Phonetics

• study of individual speech sounds

• duality
• discreteness/segmentation
• spelling (orthography) vs. pronunciation
• IPA (vs. K.K., …)
• 3 major branches
• articulatory phonetics
• Segmental Features
• Suprasegmental Features
Definition

What is phonetics?

A:The science of speech sounds is called phonetics. It aims to provide the set of

properties necessary to describe and distinguish all the sounds in human

languages throughout the world.

 3 major branches of phonetics

What is articulatory phonetics?

A: Articulatory Phonetics is the study of the production of speech sounds by the articulatory and
vocal tract by the speaker.

What is acoustic phonetics?

A: Acoustic phonetics is the study of the physical properties of sounds, and aims to analyze
sound wave signals that occur within speech through varying frequencies, amplitudes and
durations.

What is auditory phonetics?

A: Auditory phonetics is a branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing of speech sounds and
with speech perception.
Spelling vs. Pronunciation

How are the spellings of English words related to their pronunciations?

A: It's important to note that the spelling of a word is not always an accurate guide to
how it is pronounced. Similarly the pronunciation of a word is not always helpful when
working out how that word should be spelt.

What is IPA? How is different from Kenyon & Knot’s (KK) phonetic alphabet?
A:The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation
based primarily on the Latin alphabet. is a phonetic system which is for representing
the sounds of American English. There are only a few different symbols that KK uses
which is different from IPA used in other dictionaries.
Articulatory Phonetics

How are vowels different from consonants?

Vowels Consonants
Articulated with an open vocal tract. Articulated with a partially or completely
closed vocal tract.
There are 5 vowel letters in the alphabet. There are 21 consonant letters in the
English alphabet.
There are about 20 vowel sounds in There are about 24 consonant sounds in
English. English.
Vowels are the nucleus of a syllable. Consonants have to be linked with a vowel
to form a syllable.
How do we describe vowels and consonants?
A: Consonants are identified or classified in terms of voicing, place of articulation, and m
anner of articulation. Since there is no obstruction of the airstream in the production o
f vowel sounds, and since all vowel sounds are voiced and oral, we cannot describe
vowels in terms of their place of articulation, but are left with the manner, in which the
y are produced.
Prosodic suprasegmental features

What are prosodic suprasegmental features?

A: Length, pitch, and stress (or “accent”) are prosodic features.

How are these features different from segmental features?

A: They are imposed over and above the segmental values of the sounds in a syllable.

What is a syllable?
A: A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds.

How are stressed syllables different from unstressed syllables?

A: Stressed syllables are pronounced slightly louder, for a slightly longer duration, and at a
slightly higher pitch than unstressed syllables
What is a stress-timed language?
A: In general, at least one syllable is stressed in an English word.

What is a syllable-timed language?

A: The syllables have approximately the same loudness, length, and pitch.

What is a tone language?

A: Languages that use the pitch of individual vowels or syllables to contrast meanings of words
are called tone languages.
What is an intonation language?

A: Intonation language is variation of pitch that is not used to distinguish words.

How are Chinese and English similar or different in terms of their segmental and s
uprsegmental features?

A: Their pitch or tone of the syllable are linguistically significant.