Phonetics

Exercises 25

EXERCISES

(Printable versions of all the exercises are available on the CD.)

A. Fill in the names of the vocal organs numbered in Figure 1.14.

1.		8.
2.		9.
3.		10.
4.		11.
5.		12.
6.		13.
7.		14.

Figure 1.14

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26	CHAPTER 1 Articulation and Acoustics

B.Describe the consonants in the word skinflint using the chart below. Fill in all five columns, and put parentheses around the terms that may be left out, as shown for the first consonant.

	1	2	3	4	5
	Voiced or	Place of	Central or	Oral or	Articulatory
	voiceless	articulation	lateral	nasal	action
s	voiceless	alveolar	(central)	(oral)	fricative
k
n
f
l
t

C.Figure 1.15 a–g illustrates all the places for articulatory gestures that we have discussed so far, except for retroflex sounds (which will be illustrated in Chapter 7). In the spaces provided below, (1) state the place of articulation and (2) state the manner of articulation of each sound, and (3) give an example of an English word beginning with the sound illustrated.

(1) Place of

(2) Manner of

(3) Example

articulation articulation

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

D.Studying a new subject often involves learning a large number of technical terms. Phonetics is particularly challenging in this respect. Read over the definitions of the terms in this chapter before completing the exercises below. Say each of the words, and listen to the sounds. Be careful not to be confused by spellings. Using a mirror may be helpful.

1. Circle the words that begin with a bilabial consonant:

met

net

set

bet

let

pet

2. Circle the words that begin with a velar consonant:

knot

got

lot

cot

hot

pot

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Exercises 27

Figure 1.15 Sounds illustrating all the places of articulation discussed so far, except for retroflex sounds.

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28 CHAPTER 1	Articulation and Acoustics
3.	Circle the words that begin with a labiodental consonant:
	fat	cat	that			mat		chat		vat
4.	Circle the words that begin with an alveolar consonant:
	zip	nip		lip		sip		tip		dip
5.	Circle the words that begin with a dental consonant:
	pie	guy		shy		thigh		thy		high
6.	Circle the words that begin with a palato-alveolar consonant:
	sigh	shy		tie		thigh		thy		lie
7.	Circle the words that end with a fricative:
	race	wreath			bush		bring			breathe	bang
	rave	real		ray		rose		rough
8.	Circle the words that end with a nasal:
	rain	rang		dumb			deaf
9.	Circle the words that end with a stop:
	pill	lip		lit	graph			crab		dog	hide
	laugh	back
10.	Circle the words that begin with a lateral:
	nut	lull		bar		rob		one
11.	Circle the words that begin with an approximant:
	we	you		one		run
12.	Circle the words that end with an affricate:
	much	back			edge		ooze
13.	Circle the words in which the consonant in the middle is voiced:
	tracking		mother			robber		leisure			massive
	stomach		razor
14.	Circle the words that contain a high vowel:
	sat	suit		got		meet		mud
15.	Circle the words that contain a low vowel:
	weed	wad		load			lad	rude
16.	Circle the words that contain a front vowel:
	gate	caught			cat		kit		put
17.	Circle the words that contain a back vowel:
	maid	weep			coop		cop			good
18.	Circle the words that contain a rounded vowel:
	who	me		us		but		him

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Exercises 29

E.Define the consonant sounds in the middle of each of the following words as indicated in the example:

	Voiced or	Place of	Manner of
	voiceless	articulation	articulation
adder	voiced	alveolar	stop
father
singing
etching
robber
ether
pleasure
hopper
selling
sunny
lodger

F.Complete the diagrams in Figure 1.16 so as to illustrate the target for the gesture of the vocal organs for the first consonants in each of the following words. If the sound is voiced, schematize the vibrating vocal folds by drawing a wavy line at the glottis. If it is voiceless, use a straight line.

G.Figure 1.17 shows the waveform of the phrase Tom saw nine wasps. Mark this figure in a way similar to that in Figure 1.11. Using just ordinary spelling, show the center of each sound. Also indicate the manner of articulation.

H.Make your own waveform of a sentence that will illustrate different manners of articulation. You can use the WaveSurfer application that is available on the CD or download it at http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/

I.Recall the pitch of the first formant (heard best in a creaky voice) and the second formant (heard best when whispering) in the vowels in the words heed, hid, head, had, hod, hawed, hood, who’d. Compare their formants to those in the first parts of the vowels in the following words:

	First formant similar to	Second formant similar	CD 1.6
	that in the vowel in:	to that in the vowel in:

bite bait boat

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30	CHAPTER 1 Articulation and Acoustics

Figure 1.16

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Exercises 31

cat

think

nut

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32CHAPTER 1 Articulation and Acoustics

Figure 1.17 The waveform of the phrase Tom saw nine wasps.

0	0.5	1.0	1.5 seconds

J.In the next chapter, we will start using phonetic transcriptions. The following exercises prepare for this by pointing out the differences between sounds and spelling.

How many distinct sounds are there in each of the following words? Circle

the correct number.

1.	laugh	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
2.	begged	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
3.	graphic	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
4.	fish	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
5.	fishes	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
6.	fished	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
7.	batting	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8.	quick	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
9.	these	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
10.	physics	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
11.	knock	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
12.	axis	1	2	3	4	5	6	7

K.In the following sets of words, the sound of the vowel is the same in every case but one. Circle the word that has a different vowel sound.

1.	pen	said	death	mess	mean
2.	meat	steak	weak	theme	green
3.	sane	paid	eight	lace	mast
4.	ton	toast	both	note	toes
5.	hoot	good	moon	grew	suit
6.	dud	died	mine	eye	guy

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2

Phonology and Phonetic

Transcription

Many people think that learning phonetics means simply learning to use phonetic transcription. But there is really much more to the subject than learning to use a set of symbols. A phonetician is a person who can describe speech, who understands the mechanisms of speech production and speech perception, and who knows how languages use these mechanisms. Phonetic transcription is no more than a useful tool that phoneticians use in the description of speech. It is, however, a very important tool.

In this chapter, we will be concerned with the phonetic transcription of careful speech—the style of speech you use to show someone how to pronounce a word. This is called the citation style of speech. Transcriptions of citation style are particularly useful in language documentation and lexicography, and also serve as the basic phonetic observations described in phonology. In Chapter 5, we will discuss phonetic transcription of connected speech—the style that used in normal conversation.When phoneticians transcribe a citation speech utterance, we are usually concerned with how the sounds convey differences in meaning. For the most part, we describe only the significant articulations rather than the details of the sounds. For example, when saying the English word tie, some people pronounce the consonant with the blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, others with the tip of the tongue. This kind of difference in articulation does not affect the meaning of the word and is not usually transcribed. We will begin by considering just this simplest form of transcription, sometimes called a broad transcription.

In order to understand what we transcribe and what we don’t, it is necessary to understand the basic principles of phonology. Phonology is the description of the systems and patterns of sounds that occur in a language. It involves studying a language to determine its distinctive sounds, that is, those sounds that convey a difference in meaning. Children have to do this when they are learning to speak. They may not realize at first that, for example, there is a difference between the consonantsatthebeginningsofwordssuchaswhiteandright.Theylaterrealizethat these words begin with two distinct sounds. Eventually, they learn to distinguish all the sounds that can change the meanings of words.

33

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34 CHAPTER 2 Phonology and Phonetic Transcription

When two sounds can be used to differentiate words, they are said to belong to different phonemes. There must be a phonemic difference if two words (such as white and right or cat and bat) differ in only a single sound. There are, however, phonetic variations that cannot be used to distinguish words, such as the differences between the consonants at the beginning and end of the word pop. For the first of these sounds, the lips must open and there must be a puff of air before the vowel begins. After the final consonant, there may be a puff of air, but it is not necessary. In fact, you could say pop and not open your lips for hours, if it happened to be the last word you said before going to sleep. The sound at the end would still be a p. Both consonants in this word are voiceless bilabial stops. They are different, but the differences between them cannot be used to change the meaning of a word in English. They both belong to the same phoneme.

We cannot rely on the spelling to tell us whether two sounds are members of different phonemes. For example, the words phone and foam begin with the same sounds, although they have different spellings. To take a more complex example, the words key and car begin with what we can regard as the same sound, despite the fact that one is spelled with the letter k and the other with c. But in this case, the two sounds are not exactly the same. The words key and car begin with slightly different sounds. If you whisper just the first consonants in these two words, you can probably hear the difference, and you may be able to feel that your tongue touches the roof of the mouth in a different place for each word. This example shows that there may be very subtle differences between members of a phoneme. The sounds at the beginning of key and car are slightly different, but it is not a difference that changes the meaning of a word in English. They are both members of the same phoneme.

We noted other small changes in sounds that do not affect the meaning in Chapter 1, where we saw that the tongue is farther back in true than in tea, and the n in tenth is likely to be dental, whereas the n in ten is usually alveolar. In some cases, the members of a phoneme are more different from one another. For example, most Americans (and some younger speakers of British English) have a t in the middle of pity that is very different from the t at the end of the word pit. The one in pity sounds more like a d. Consider also the l in play. You can say just the first two consonants in this word without any voicing, but still hear the l (try doing this). When you say the whole word play, the l is typically voiceless, and very different from the l in lay. Say the l at the beginning of lay, and you’ll hear that it is definitely voiced.

It follows from these examples that a phoneme is not a single sound, but a name for a group of sounds. There is a group of t sounds and a group of l sounds that occur in English. It is as if you had in your mind an ideal t or l, and the ones that are actually produced are variations that differ in small ways that do not affect the meaning. These groups of sounds—the phonemes—are abstract units that form the basis for writing down a language systematically and unambiguously. (Peter Ladefoged’s book Vowels and Consonants has an extended discussion of the relationship between written language and phonology in which

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