Consonants

10 Key excerpts on "Consonants"

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  Linguistic Perspectives on Language and Education

  • Anita K. Barry(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Along the way, we obstruct the air by various means, which gives rise to a wide array of speech sounds. We classify sounds according to how much obstruction is required to produce them. "Consonants" require the most obstruction, "vowels" the least. In between, there is a class of sounds called "approximants." Let's begin by exploring how the body produces Consonants. Consonants The term "consonant" has a somewhat different definition in phonetics than it does in ordinary usage. For most of us, the term refers to certain letters of the alphabet, those that are not vowels. So, any letter that is not a, e, i, o y u (and sometimes y) is considered to be a consonant. But in linguistics, the term refers to a sound that is produced with a clear and definite obstruction of air as it progresses through the vocal tract. If you compare the pronunciation of the b in bag with the a in bag, you will see that the b sound requires you to obstruct the air with your lips, while for the a it seems to flow through unob- structed. There is considerable overlap between phonetic Consonants and what our alphabet calls a consonant, but as you will soon see, the overlap is not total. Phonetics Figure 2.1 1. LIPS 2. TEETH 3. ALVEOLAR RIDGE 4. HARD PALATE 5. SOFT PALATE (VELUM) 6. UVULA 7. TONGUE 8. GLOTTIS In order to describe a phonetic consonant, it helps to ask four questions about the production of that sound. Each question has a set of technical answers that together define the sound. The above diagram of the vocal tract (Figure 2.1) might be useful to you in understanding these descriptions. The first question we ask is: Where does the air exift There are two choices here. The air will exit from the mouth alone if the velum is raised, in which case we call the sound "oral." Or the velum may be lowered to allow air to escape through the nose as well as the mouth, in which case the sound is called "nasal." Consider, for example, the b sound in bat.

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  Language Files

  Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 13th Edition

  • Department of Linguistics(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Ohio State University Press

    (Publisher)

  In running speech, the pronuncia- tions of words may be affected by the surrounding words (see Section 2.1.2 on phonetic co-articulation or File 3.3 on phonological assimilation), and one of the open research ques- tions in the study of language processing is how the human mind processes running speech into its meaningful component parts (see Chapter 9). 46 F I L E 2.2 Articulation: English Consonants 2.2.1 Introducing Articulatory Phonetics Say the word hiss and hold the [s]. Now inhale while holding the tongue position of [s]. What part of your tongue is cooled by the incoming airstream? What part of the roof of your mouth is cooled? Simple, intuitive observations such as these (bolstered by careful X-ray and palatography studies) lead to an articulatory description of speech sounds like the Consonants of English. Articulation, also called an articulatory gesture, is the motion or positioning of some part of the vocal tract (often, but not always, a muscular part like the tongue and/or lips) with respect to some other part of the vocal tract in the produc- tion of a speech sound (more on this below). The focus of this file is the articulation of English Consonants. Recall from Section 2.1.3 that Consonants are speech sounds that are produced with a constriction somewhere in the vocal tract that impedes the airflow. When describing a consonant, it is therefore necessary to provide information about three different aspects of its articulation: • Are the vocal folds vibrating during the constriction (i.e., is the sound voiced or voice- less)? • Where is the airstream constricted (i.e., what is the place of articulation)? • How is the airstream constricted (i.e., what is the manner of articulation)? The voicing, place, and manner of articulation are known as segmental features.

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  Phonetics for Communication Disorders

  • Martin J. Ball, Nicole Muller(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Answers to all the exercises are available at the end of the book. 6 Articulation: Consonant Manner lYpes INTRODUCTION Unlike vowels, Consonants are articulated with a close or fairly close constriction between he articulators. In fact, the proximity of the articulators to each other is going to provide us ith the classification of consonant classes, or manners of articulation. Before we look at this lassification, however, we have to consider the phonetic parameters we use for describing onsonants. As with vowels, we need to take the vertical (or height) dimension into considera-ion: this deals with the distance between the articulators we have just mentioned. Second, we ave to examine the horizontal dimension: Where are the articulators making their constriction n terms of front to back through the oral cavity and beyond? We will look at this feature in he following chapter. Then we need to examine the lateral dimension: whether the airflow is entral across the tongue body, or directed to flow over the side of the tongue. We also need to ote whether the airflow during the production of the consonant is oral or nasal. We can also i stingui sh between strong (fortis) and weak (lenis) sounds in terms of the muscular effort and esultant amount of airflow. Finally, there is the temporal characteristic of the Consonants: are hey prolongable, or instantaneous? Examining the vertical dimension gives us three main categories of Consonants: 1. Stops. These are made with the articulators (e.g., the two lips, or the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge) brought so closely together that an air-tight seal is caused, and the air is stopped. 2. Fricatives. These are made with the articulators very close together, but a narrow channel remains open through which air can flow. Because the channel is narrow, the resultant air flow is turbulent. We hear this as a noisy quality that is called friction or frication in phonetics.

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  The Pronunciation of English

  A Course Book

  • Charles W. Kreidler(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  For a more extensive treatment of the physiology of speech production see Ladefoged (1993, ch. 1), and Clark and Yallop (1995, ch. 2). The features introduced here and in the next chapter are taken from Chomsky and Halle (1968). Jakobson (1941) is a pioneering work, still valuable, in explaining how infants acquire the sound system of the language of the community into which they are born. Lenneberg (1967) is also a pioneer in stating that language acquisition is biologically determined to a large extent, something that a child does at the appropriate stage of maturation, much as it learns to sit up, crawl, walk, etc. when it is ready to do so. Clark and Clark (1977) and Dale (1976) contain good accounts of how a child acquires its native language. 30 Consonants 3 Consonants This chapter describes English Consonants, specifically stops, fricatives, nasals, and liquids. The previous chapter explained that these phoneme classes are different manners of articulation, and we examined the features that make these classes different from one another. Here we are concerned with what the different stops, fricatives, and nasals are and what features distinguish the stops from one another, fricatives from one another, and so on. Three kinds of features are important for differentiating Consonants: voice – whether vocal cords are vibrating or not tongue shape – whether the tongue has a flat surface, a groove along the center line, or is curled at the sides articulator – whether the lower lip, tongue tip, tongue front, or tongue back blocks the air stream as it goes out 3 a Preliminary exercise: identifying Consonants by matching (a) The words in the left-hand column below begin with 22 different con-sonants. The words in the right-hand columns begin with the same 22 Consonants, but in a different order. Match each word on the left with the word on the right which has the same initial consonant (sound, not letter), and put the appropriate number in front of the word.

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  English Phonetics and Pronunciation Practice

  • Paul Carley, Inger M. Mees, Beverley Collins(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The part which lies under the hard palate and the part under the soft palate are called the front and back of the tongue respectively. This may seem strange at first, but front and back refer to the part of the tongue used in the articulation of vowels (see section 5.1.1) – the front is the part of the tongue used to form front vowels, and the back is the part used to form back vowels. The tip and blade remain low in the mouth and aren’t involved in making vowels. Finally, the part of the tongue in the pharynx is the root. 2.2 Describing Consonants A consonant is a speech sound which involves an obstruction of the airstream as it passes through the vocal tract. Describing a consonant involves describing the nature of the obstruction, and there are three factors to be taken into consideration: voicing, place of articulation and manner of articulation. 2.2.1 Voicing Voicing refers to the actions of the vocal folds during the articulation of a consonant. Different actions of the vocal folds produce voiced and voiceless sounds (Table 2.1). It’s easiest to appreciate the voicing in sounds like /v ð z ʒ m n ŋ l r/ because these can be prolonged. Put your hand on your throat as you say them and feel the vibration. Note how the vibration stops and starts as you stop and start the consonant. A number of English Consonants come in pairs, the only difference between them being that one is voiceless and one is voiced. These pairs are /f v/, /θ ð/, /s z/, /ʃ ʒ/, /p b/, /t d/, /k ɡ/ and /ʧ ʤ/

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  American English Phonetics and Pronunciation Practice

  • Paul Carley, Inger Mees, Inger M. Mees(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The part of the tongue that narrows to the tip and that lies under the alveolar ridge is the blade of the tongue. The part that lies under the hard palate and the part under the soft palate are called the front and back of the tongue respectively. This may seem strange at first, but front and back refer to the part of the tongue used in the articulation of vowels (see Section 5.1.1) – the front is the part of the tongue used to form front vowels and the back is the part used to form back vowels. The tip and blade remain low in the mouth and are not involved in making vowels. Finally, the part of the tongue in the pharynx is the root. 2.2 Describing Consonants A consonant is a speech sound that involves an obstruction of the airstream as it passes through the vocal tract. Describing a consonant involves describing the nature of the obstruction, and there are three factors to be taken into consideration: voicing, place of articulation, and manner of articulation. 2.2.1 Voicing Voicing refers to the actions of the vocal folds during the articulation of a consonant. Different actions of the vocal folds produce voiced and voiceless sounds. For voiced sounds (i.e., vowels and the voiced Consonants /b d ɡ ʤ v ð z ʒ m n ŋ l r j w/), the vocal folds are held gently together so that the airflow from the lungs causes them to vibrate. For voiceless sounds (i.e., the voiceless Consonants /p t k ʧ f θ s ʃ h/), the vocal folds are held apart as in the position for normal breathing. It’s easiest to appreciate the voicing in sounds like /v ð z ʒ m n ŋ l r/ because these can be prolonged. Put your hand on your throat as you say them and feel the vibration. Note how the vibration stops and starts as you stop and start the consonant. A number of English Consonants come in pairs, the only difference between them being that one is voiceless and one is voiced. These pairs are: /f v/, /θ ð/, /s z/, /ʃ ʒ/, /p b/, /t d/, /k ɡ/, and /ʧ ʤ/

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  Introducing Linguistics

  Theoretical and Applied Approaches

  • Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, John W. Schwieter(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  So far, you have learned why we need the IPA and have also started to think about how individual sounds are produced and how to describe them (Pause and Reflect 2.5). In the next section, you will learn how to transcribe Consonants and vowels, the basic categories of sound for human speech. 2.4 Transcribing Consonants and Vowels Sounds can be divided into Consonants and vowels: • Consonants have some type of constriction when they are articulated. For example, [b] has a constriction at the lips and [s] has constriction at the alveolar ridge (the ridge you feel just behind your teeth). • Vowels are produced with no constriction. To produce [o], your tongue is in the middle of your mouth and there is no blocking of the air flow at all. In Figure 2.5, you can see that the largest section of the IPA includes pulmonic con- sonants, produced with air pressure from the lungs. In the first row, across the top, are columns that refer to the place of articulation of sounds (e.g., [f] is produced using Figure 2.5 IPA pulmonic Consonants. From: http://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. Unported License. Copyright © 2018 International Phonetic Association 36 Phonetics your upper teeth and lower lip, which is why it is a labiodental sound). The first column on the left refers to how sounds are produced, or the manner of articulation. For example, nasal sounds are produced by forcing the air out through the nasal cavity, hence the name. In cells where there are two symbols (e.g., [t] and [d]), the one on the left is voiceless and the other is voiced. In Figure 2.5, there are certain cells that are empty and others that are colored grey. The empty cells represent sounds that could exist in human language but do not. Grey cells are sounds that are humanly impossible to articulate.

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  American English Phonetics and Pronunciation Practice

  • Paul Carley, Inger Mees(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The tongue has few obvious natural divisions in the way that the vocal tract does. However, phoneticians find it convenient to divide it into a number of parts when describing sounds and their articulations (see Figure 2.2). The very point of the tongue is known as the tip. The part of the tongue that narrows to the tip and that lies under the alveolar ridge is the blade of the tongue. The part that lies under the hard palate and the part under the soft palate are called the front and back of the tongue respectively. This may seem strange at first, but front and back refer to the part of the tongue used in the articulation of vowels (see Section 5.1.1) – the front is the part of the tongue used to form front vowels and the back is the part used to form back vowels. The tip and blade remain low in the mouth and are not involved in making vowels. Finally, the part of the tongue in the pharynx is the root. 2.2 Describing Consonants A consonant is a speech sound that involves an obstruction of the airstream as it passes through the vocal tract. Describing a consonant involves describing the nature of the obstruc- tion, and there are three factors to be taken into consideration: voicing, place of articulation, and manner of articulation. 2.2.1 Voicing Voicing refers to the actions of the vocal folds during the articulation of a consonant. Differ- ent actions of the vocal folds produce voiced and voiceless sounds. • For voiced sounds (i.e., vowels and the voiced Consonants /b d ɡ ʤ v ð z ʒ m n ŋ l r j w/), the vocal folds are held gently together so that the airflow from the lungs causes them to vibrate. • For voiceless sounds (i.e., the voiceless Consonants /p t k ʧ f θ s ʃ h/), the vocal folds are held apart as in the position for normal breathing. It’s easiest to appreciate the voicing in sounds like /v ð z ʒ m n ŋ l r/ because these can be prolonged. Put your hand on your throat as you say them and feel the vibration.

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  Calvert's Descriptive Phonetics

  • Pamela G. Garn-Nunn, James M. Lynn(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Thieme

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R 5 C ONSONANTS ANALYSIS OF Consonants REVIEW VOCABULARY EXERCISES ANALYSIS OF Consonants As we noted in Chapter 3, Consonants traditionally have been classified accord-ing to three characteristics: place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voic-ing. Place of articulation refers to the location (e.g., labial, alveolar) of airstream modification or to those parts of the speech mechanism used most prominently in consonant production.You learned the terms to describe place of articulation in Chapter 2. For example, /p/ and /b/ share a bilabial place of articulation, whereas /h/ has a glottal place of articulation. Manner of articulation refers to the way the airstream is modified.You will learn the Consonants according to their manner of articulation: stop, fricative, affricate, nasal, and approximant/oral res-onant ( liquids and glides ). The third classification category, voicing, refers to vocal fold vibration, as you also learned in Chapter 2. Consonants such as /b/ and /z/, which involve phonation, are voiced, and Consonants such as /p/ and /s/, made without phonation, are voiceless. It is also important to understand the terminology that refers to the role of con-sonants in relation to vowels.We can refer to Consonants as singletons (one con-sonant with no Consonants adjacent to it) or sequences (two or more Consonants in succession in the same syllable or word).We can also refer to consonant single-tons or sequences as prevocalic, intervocalic, or postvocalic. Prevocalic refers to consonant(s) occurring before a vowel, at the beginning of a word, and postvocalic is the term applied to consonant(s) that occur after a vowel, at the end of a word. If a consonant is intervocalic, then it occurs between two vowels in a multisyllabic word.Thus, /p/ is a prevocalic consonant singleton in the word [pa ñ ] ( pie ), and /sp/ is a prevocalic consonant sequence in the word [spa ñ ] ( spy ).

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  Calvert's Descriptive Phonetics

  Introduction and Transcription Workbook

  • Pamela G. Garn-Nunn(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Thieme

    (Publisher)

  OVERVIEW OF Consonants: PLACE, MANNER, VOICING CONSONANT SINGLETONS, SEQUENCES, AND SYLLABLE PLACEMENT CONSONANT ANALYSIS BY MANNER OF ARTICULATION CONCEPT QUESTIONS OVERVIEW OF Consonants: PLACE, MANNER, VOICING As discussed in Chapter 3, Consonants have traditionally been classified according to three characteristics: place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing. Place of articulation refers to the location (e.g., labial, alveolar) of airstream modification or to those parts of the speech mechanism used most prominently in consonant pro-duction.You learned the terms to describe place of articulation in Chapter 2. For example, /p/ and /b/ share a bilabial place of articulation, whereas /h/ has a glottal place of articulation. Manner of articulation refers to the way the airstream is modified. In this chapter the Consonants are presented according to their manner of articulation: stop , fricative , affricate , nasal , and approximant/oral reso-nant ( liquids and glides ). The third classification category, voicing , refers to vocal fold vibration, as you also learned in Chapter 2. Consonants such as /b/ and /z/, which involve phonation, are voiced , and Consonants such as /p/ and /s/, made without phonation, are voiceless . Many of the Consonants occur in cognate pairs . Cognates are phonemes which share the same place and manner but differ in voicing. Thus, /p/ and /b/ are cognates, as are /s/ and /z/. CONSONANT SINGLETONS, SEQUENCES, AND SYLLABLE PLACEMENT It is also important to understand the terminology that refers to the role of conso-nants in relation to vowels. We can refer to Consonants as singletons (one conso-nant with no Consonants adjacent to it) or sequences (two or more Consonants in succession in the same syllable or word). We can also refer to consonant singletons or sequences as prevocalic , intervocalic , or postvocalic (or initial , medial, and final , respectively).

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