Contrastive Analysis 3

By Thuy Thanh Nguyen, Ph.D.

English Department
Hanoi University
Outline

● Revision
● Phonetics & Phonology
● Aims of CAP
● Practice
Phonetics

● How are speech sounds made?

● How many different sounds do languages use?
● How many sounds travel through the air?
● How is it registered by the ears?
● How can we measure speech?
Phonology

● How do languages organize sounds to distinguish

different words?
● How do languages restrict, or constrain, sequences of
sounds?
● What sort of changes (alterations) do sounds undergo if
sequences arise that don’t obey the restrictions?
● How are sounds organized into larger constituents
(syllables, words, phrases)?
Contrastive aspects of PP

● segmental phoneme and phone inventories of the two

languages
● distributional properties of segmental phonemes and
phones in the two languages
● suprasegmental properties of both languages.
PP basic concepts
Phonetics
- A branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds

O’Grady (2005)

- Phoneticians → the physical properties of speech

+ articulatory phonetics: the way humans plan and execute movements to
produce speech
+ acoustic phonetics: the way such various movements influence the
resulting sound
+ auditory phonetics: the way humans convert sound waves to linguistic
information
- The smallest unit: a phone
Articulatory phonetics
- Provides descriptions of speech sounds in terms of their articulations
(how articulators/vocal organs move to make sounds)

- speech as sequences of separate segments called consonants and

vowels, and sounds as a combination of articulatory properties.

- To obtain knowledge about these sequences, phoneticians use

several laboratory techniques, such as electropalatography (EPG) or

ultrasound.
Acoustic phonetics
- studies the sound in the air that travels from a speaker to
a listener.
- phoneticians need to turn sounds into visual
representations, and from these graphs, we can analyze
and compare frequencies and other properties of sounds,
Acoustic phonetics (cont.)

- Results of measurements:
- duration,
- intensity,
- and pitch
Auditory phonetics
- Main concern: is the action of speech sounds hearing and
their perception in the listener’s perspective → studies
surround the relationships between speech stimuli and a
listener’s responses to such stimuli,
- Physical properties of sounds to be measured: amplitude
(intensity), fundamental frequency, spectral structure,
and duration → loudness, pitch, sound quality, and length.
- Asking listeners to report on what they hear and
understand.
Phonology
- Studies the systematic organization of sounds in a language.
- Aim: establish distinctive differences between sounds,
identify and describe the phonemes and the phonemic
system of a language.
- There are mainly two approaches, i.e., formally
distributional approach and semantic method.
- Distributional approach: analyzing the position/distribution of the
sound in the word,
- Semantic method on the meaning generated by the sounds.
Phonological tools
- To facilitate the analyzing process, it is necessary to
represent speech sounds on the page. → phonetic
symbols (i.e., the IPA)
- The analysis is performed through the system of
phonological 24 oppositions,
- A phoneme and an allophone
- Phonological rules (phonological process)
- Syllable structure
- Distinctive features
- Prosody: The suprasegmental features occur simultaneously with
vowels and consonants but stretch 26 across larger units like syllables,
words, or sentences
- Stress & intonation
Similarities & Differences in
Phonologies of Languages
←> ergonomics of the speech process
- Distinctions: easy to perceive/produce
E.g.: [t] [n]
all languages: dental/alveolar [t] and [n], 64% [d]
< 0.5% [ no]
- Low-cost contrasts → consonants and vowels →
universal & innate
Similarities & Differences in
Phonologies of Languages
1, Varying complexity

- Number of segments

E.g.: the smallest number 11 (e.g. Rotokas, spoken in Papua

New Guinea)

the largest 141 (!Xu ̃, spoken in Namibia and Angola)

Similarities & Differences in
Phonologies of Languages
- Differences in constraints
Blevins (1995):
+ the lowest degree of complexity in syllable structure: a single
(short) vowel in the peak and optionally allow maximally one
consonant in the onset → (C)V
+ The Onset may be obligatory: CV.
+ There may be a coda.
+ The onset may be complex (allow 1 or 2 C in the onset)
+ The peak may be complex, i.e. be VV.
Similarities & Differences
2, Universals:
- All languages have syllables, and all segment inventories can
be split into consonants and vowels.
- All consonant inventories include voiceless plosives, i.e. all
languages have at least two of the three consonants [p,t,k].
- Unusual segments tend to occur in larger segment
inventories.
- Unusual segments tend to be phonologically more complex
than common segments.
Similarities & Differences
Implications:

- A language will only have segment X if it already has segment Y.

E.g.: a voiceless nasal - voiced counterpart,

[z] - [s].

- One way in which languages construct their segment inventories is by

adding elements to already existing segments.

E.g.: [p,t,k] → ‘vibrating vocal cords’ → [ph, th, kh]

- Maddieson (1984): the number of vowels and the number of consonants

are positively correlated.
- Unusual segments tend to be less frequent in the languages that have
them.
Similarities & Differences
- Plosives are more common than fricatives.
- Voiceless plosives are more common than voiced ones.
- Voiceless fricatives are more common than voiced
fricatives.
- Front rounded and back unrounded vowels are less
common than either front unrounded or back rounded
vowels.
CPA → Pronunciation problems

• Phonemic asymmetries: will be the source of more

fundamental distortions, often leading to unintelligibility

• Allophonic differences: leads to “foreign accent” without

much impairment of communication
CPA - Functional loads of comparable
phonological contrasts

• Functional load refers to the relative importance of

linguistic contrasts in a language.

Eg: the majority of the consonants in English form a

voiced/voiceless contrast → high functional load