Phonetics Exam

Speech is the primary means of communicating. Speech is natural, children acquire it naturally, writing systems are not ubiquitous in languages around the world.

Phonetics sudies speech sound1) production 2) transmission 3) reception

1) Articulatory: anatomy and physiology of speech, how humans produce and describe sound2) Acoustic: study of physics of sound, properties of the sound wave3) Auditory/ Perceptual: How people hear and perceive /recognize/process sounds

1) The talker (articulation, aerodynamics)eg assimilation- talker-driven sound change like incongruent2) The listener (acoustics, speech perception) eg merger- listener-driven sound change like pen and pin

Adaptive dispersion is listener-driven inventory constraint. The most common vowel inventories in the languages of the world are "triangular"

Dance can be decomposed into gestures. A gesture is a constriction action of one of the vocal tract organs.ex. "bad" "pad" "Bingo" all begin with closure gesture of the lip organ. The closure action is an essential for these words.

Gestures of distinct vocal organs can be used to distinguish words from one another. eg. "bad" begins with closure gesture of the lips "dad" begins with closure gesture of the tip of the tongue

Gestures combine to form dances for words. There are approx. 25 distinct gesture types of English that combine and recombine to make about 1/2 million words.

An articulator is several independently moveable parts of the vocal tract.

Several independently moveable parts of the vocal tract (articulators) and many muscles (as many as 15!) act in a coordinated interdependent fashion to achieve the goal of a given constricting organ. ex. Lip closure gesture: 3 articulators:Upper Lip, Lower Lip, and Jaw

Gestures are analogous to the use of "signs" like Ausian. In speech, gestures of the tongue, lips, and larynx (largely invisible) are communicated acoustically to the auditory system of the receiver.

The phonological phonetic representation is a sequence of finite number of discrete atomic segments: the phones; stable representation of speech event; it's a way of annotating the articulation of a word or speech wave, using a string of alphabetic symbols.

CONTINUUM

We make speech sounds through the manipulation of air with the different organs of the vocal tract using sound generation and sound shaping.

Sound generation causes air to vibrate at audible frequencies. It includes vocal fold vibration and makes different kinds of noises like grunts, hisses, clicks...