Stops

10 Key excerpts on "Stops"

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  eBook - PDF

  Phonetics for Communication Disorders

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

    (Publisher)

  Stops: PLOSIVES AND NASALS The production of a stop consonant requires a complete closure between the articulators so that airflow through the oral cavity is stopped. The seal must be air-tight, and this can be achieved by pressing one articulator firmly against the other. An example of this might be the movement of the tongue tip and blade up to the alveolar ridge resulting in a firm contact there. However, for air to be fully stopped, the side rims of the tongue must also make a seal against the insides of the upper side teeth. Stops can be made at a wide variety of places within the oral cavity (and even in the pharynx and at the glottis), and we explore these different places in the next chapter. If airflow is stopped in the oral cavity, there are two possible outcomes: The air is eventually allowed to leave the oral cavity with the removal of the articulatory closure (oral release of the air), or the air can escape through the nasal cavity if the velum is lowered at the time the articulatory closure is made (nasal release of the air). This means that there are, in fact, two categories of stop sounds: oral Stops, or plosives, and nasal Stops, or simply nasals. Plosives As the name suggests, these Stops are characterized by a popping quality that sounds a little like a very small explosion! (Interestingly, many of our words for explosions start with plosive consonants: pop, hang, crash, boom.) How do these mini-explosions come about? Oral Stops, as we have just noted, require the airflow to be literally stopped in the oral cavity. Further, they also require that the velum be raised, so that no air can escape through the nasal cavity. This means that the air flowing up from the lungs is trapped in the oral cavity behind the closure of the articulators, and this inevitably results in a buildup of pressure.

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  Relevant Acoustic Phonetics of L2 English

  Focus on Intelligibility

  • Ettien Koffi(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Table 5-1 :

  Table 5-1: English Stop Consonants.

  POA
  Laryngeal Feature	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar24
  MOA	Stop	− voice	p	t	k
  + voice	b	d	g

  The label “plosive” is also used to describe Stops. One commentator writes playfully that these sounds are labeled this way because there are mini explosions in the mouth when they are produced. The simplicity with which speakers produce Stops betrays the articulatory complexity involved in producing them. In fact, Ogden (2009:96) says that “plosives are among the most variable and complex sounds in English” Abercrombie (1967:140-1) has deconstructed the articulatory gestures of plosives into three phases to make them easier to grasp and to analyze. The acronym CHR, representing Close, Hold, Release in Figure 5-1 helps focus on the articulatory and acoustic events involved in each phase.

    _______________

  23   Following Ladegofed and Maddieson (1996:102), I do not include nasals among Stops. Nasals are dealt with sonorants in Chapter 7 .

  24   GAE has a glottal stop [?]. It is not listed in Table 1 because it is not a phoneme, but only an allophone of /t/ in specific environments, as mentioned in Chapter 1 , Appendix 1.

  Figure 5-1: Articulation of Plosives.

  Ogden (2009:97, 99) succinctly describes the most relevant events in each one of the CHR phases, as follows:

  As the articulators move to form the closure, the shape of the vocal tract is changed. Acoustically, changes in shape of the vocal tract lead to changes in its natural resonances. ... During the holding phase time, the vocal tract is completely closed. Air cannot escape through the nose because the velum is raised; air is trapped behind the closure. However, the lungs are still forcing air out of the vocal tract, so the pressure behind the closure builds up. ... The duration of the hold phase depends on many factors. In citation form and before a pause, the hold is longer for [p, t, k] than for [b, d, g]. Finally, the two articulators are released, letting the air trapped behind the closure out. Because this air is at a higher pressure than the air on the other side, the release generates a transient burst of noise. This part of a plosive is often called the ‘plosive burst’.

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  Phonetics

  The Science of Speech

  • Martin J Ball, Joan Rahilly(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In this instance the articulators do not part immediately, and the compressed air is released slowly and inaudibly through the nasal cavity (and possibly also the oral cavity after the eventual parting of the articulators) as part of normal breathing. An example in English would be an unreleased [ t ] in the phrase ‘give me my hat’. This type of incomplete stop is transcribed with the same diacritic as above: [ t͉ ]. Figure 4.6 (a) Non-overlapping stop sequences; (b) overlapping stop sequences These unexploded Stops in English only occur with the voiceless (or fortis) plosives, and they are often ‘reinforced’ through the simultaneous use of a glottal stop. Such double articulations (see Chapter 7) can be transcribed as, for example, [ ʔt͉̯ ]. Stops and phonation In this section we will examine the relationship between the three phases of stop production and phonatory activity: in other words the co-ordination of voicing with plosives. Perhaps the most straightforward case involves fully voiced plosives. If we return to the example in Figure 4.1 (reproduced as the top example in Figure 4.7), it can be noted that the line representing vocal fold vibration remains unchanged from the vowel before the stop to the vowel following it. Fully voiced Stops, of course, do need a continual flow of air through the glottis to maintain the voicing; at the same time we have the complete blockage within the oral cavity that constitutes the stop. This closure, as we have noted before, allows the build-up of air pressure needed to produce plosion. There comes a point, however, where the air pressure behind the closure is as great as the sub-glottal air pressure which forces the pulmonic egressive air past the vibrating vocal folds. This results in fully voiced Stops being usually of shorter duration than voiceless ones, as the closure stage cannot be maintained so long

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  Applied English Phonology

  • Mehmet Yavas(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  3 English Consonants

  3.1 Stops

  We will start our account of the English consonants and their allophones with the most versatile group, Stops. As we saw in Chapter 1 , articulation of Stops can be analyzed in three stages (closing stage, closed stage, and release stage).

  English has six stop phonemes, /p, b, t, d, k, ɡ/. Their differences can be examined in different dimensions. First, with respect to place of articulation, there is a three‐way distinction: bilabials /p, b/, alveolars /t, d/, and velars /k, ɡ/. Bilabials /p/ and /b/ are made by forming the closure with upper and lower lips and, after building up the pressure necessary, releasing the closure abruptly, as in pay [pe] and bay [be]. Alveolar Stops /t/ and /d/ utilize the tip of the tongue to form the closure with the alveolar ridge, as in tip [tɪp] and dip [dɪp]. Finally, for velars /k/ and /ɡ/, we raise the back of the tongue to make a contact with the soft palate (velum), as in cap [kæp] and gap [ɡæp].

  While the account of the places of articulation for Stops is very straightforward, the characteristics related to their voicing are not so. It is customary in manuals to see labels such as “voiceless” and “voiced” for /p, t, k/ and /b, d, ɡ/, respectively. Although this definitely reflects the truth for /p, t, k/, which are always voiceless, and may indeed be true for /b, d, ɡ/ in several languages (e.g. Spanish, French), it will hold in English only for the intervocalic position in such words as aboard [әbↄ d], adore [әdↄ ], eager [iɡɚ]. In initial and final positions (following or preceding silence) /b, d, ɡ/ are partially voiced, if at all.

  (a)	bay	(b)	cab	(c)	bib
  	day		sad		did
  	gay		sag		gig

  In the words in (a), we may have partially‐voiced (and indeed little‐voiced, i.e. with very little vocal cord activity) /b, d, ɡ/ in initial positions. In (b), the words contain partially voiced final Stops. In (c), each word has /b, d, ɡ/ in both initial and final positions that are not fully voiced. Because English /b, d, ɡ/ are fully voiced only in intervocalic position, several phoneticians prefer the classification in terms of fortis and lenis

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  A Historical Phonology of English

  • Donka Minkova(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  During the production of /p, b, t, d, k, g/, there is a brief instance when the air is completely stopped; these consonants are Stops , also called plosives . During the production of the consonants /f, v, θ , ð s, z, ʃ , /, the airstream encoun-ters a constriction, but the air flows through it generating some noisy friction; these are the fricatives , also called spirants . English combines Stops and fricatives in the production of the consonants /t ʃ / as in ch ess and /d / as in j oke , in which the air is stopped for a brief period, and is then released with a certain degree of friction. The consonants that combine the manner of articulation of Stops (plosion) and fricatives (friction) are called affricates . The only English Stops that can be affricated are /t/ and /d/. A different type of contrast depends on the path through which the air comes out of the vocal tract. Typically, consonants are produced within the oral cavity; they are called oral consonants, not marked in Figure 2.2. In the production of /m, n, ŋ /, however, the airflow is blocked from the oral tract and is instead channelled through the nasal cavity, so they are called nasals . The production of the approximants /r, l, j, w/ is associated with the lowest degree of constriction. Within that set, the air can exit through the central part of the oral cavity, or it can be diverted: the approximant 30 A HISTORICAL PHONOLOGY OF ENGLISH /l/ is called lateral because during its production the airflow is deflected around the sides of the tongue. Also within this group, /r, l/ are called liquids . As noted above, /j, w/ are also identified as glides or semivowels . The major manners of articulation relevant to the description of English consonants are: • Stops /p, b, t, d, k, g/: the air is completely stopped for a brief period heard at the beginning of words ( t own , d own ), in the middle of words ( u p on , ci g ar , su ck er ), or word-finally as in ra g , ri b , so ck .

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  Phonological Studies

  • Roman Jakobson(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The optimal, stop consonant finds its opposite in the constrictive, which attenuates the consonantal reduction of energy. Stops are an earlier acquisition of children and a later loss of aphasies than constrictive phonemes. There are in the world several languages without constrictives but no languages without Stops. The appearance of liquids, which combine the clear-cut formant struc-ture of a vowel with the consonantal reduction of energy, changes the contrast consonant/vowel into two autonomous oppositions, consonan-tal/non-consonantal and vocalic/non-vocalic. While the consonantal feature, reduction of energy, is optimally represented by the stop, which tends toward a single pulse, the non-vocalic feature, absence of sharply-defined formant structure, is optimally manifested by the strident con-sonant, which tends toward white noise. Therefore, the mutual eman-cipation of the two features, discontinuous/continuant on the one hand and strident/mellow on the other, implies the acquisition of a liquid that combines two autonomous features, the vocalic and the consonantal. Actually, mellow constrictives, as opposed to strident constrictives, or strident plosives (affricates), as opposed to mellow plosives (Stops pro-per), do not appear in child language before the emergence of the first liquid, and, in aphasia, vanish when the liquids are lost. Strident plosives, in contradistinction to mellow plosives, attenuate the consonantal reduction of energy. The mellow constrictives deviate from the non-vocalic optimum embodied in the strident constrictives, namely 496 PHONOLOGY AND PHONETICS from their markedly noisy pattern. One and the same split of the con-sonantal feature, on the one hand, and of the non-vocalic feature, on the other, is manifested both in the appearance of the liquids and of the strident Stops.

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  Turbulent Sounds

  An Interdisciplinary Guide

  • Susanne Fuchs, Martine Toda, Marzena Zygis, Susanne Fuchs, Martine Toda, Marzena Zygis(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  An overview of the phonology of obstruents ∗ T. A. Hall and Marzena ĩ ygis 1. Introduction Sounds in the languages of the world involving turbulent noise are referred to in generative phonology as ‘obstruents’, a natural class subsuming Stops, affricates and fricatives. Sounds not belonging to the class of obstruents are traditionally considered to be ‘sonorants’, namely vowels, glides, liquids, nasals. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the phonology of obstruents, concentrating on the three subcategories ‘Stops’, ‘affricates’ and ‘fricatives’ and the rules in natural languages which change a sound from one of those categories to a sound in one of the other two. We begin in section 2 by discussing the distinctive feature used for capturing the sonorant vs. obstruent dimension ([sonorant]). In section 3 and 4 we turn to the features used to express the contrast between Stops vs. affricates ([strident]) and Stops vs. fricatives ([continuant]), respectively. In each section we discuss traditional definitions of the respective features as well as rules in a wide variety of languages which change the values of one of these features, e.g. obstruent → sonorant, stop → affricate, stop → fricative (and the respective mirror image rules). In section 5 we provide examples of processes which are problematic in terms of features but which can be explained if phonetic evidence (in addition to the phonological features) is taken into account. The aim of that section is to show the limits of feature theory – at least in its current state. Although a number of works have appeared through the years which analyse the kinds of rules we discuss below, a number of controversial issues relating to feature theory remain.

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  Experimental Phonetics

  An Introduction

  • Katrina Hayward(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  burst . Stop consonants may also show release bursts when they occur before a pause or before another consonant, though this will vary depending on the language, the speaker and the speaking style.

  The constriction interval for a stop consonant, accordingly, consists of silence or near-silence. It is often referred to as the silent interval or the stop gap . The interval ends with the release of pressure at the burst. This is generally easy to locate on a spectrogram, because it corresponds to a brief vertical spike, though it is weaker for labials than for other places of articulation. In contrast, the beginning of the interval is often difficult to locate precisely. This is not surprising when we remember that, unlike the burst, the blocking of the airstream is not a sudden event but occurs more gradually as the articulators come together. Also, although the articulators are together and the soft palate is raised, the seal may not be absolutely complete. Accordingly, some acoustic energy may be visible (as faint shading) during the interval itself. These general characteristics are apparent in the stop consonants illustrated in Figures 7.2 –7.4 .

  FIGURE 7.2 Spectrogram of the Javanese word papat ‘four’, pronounced by a male speaker from East Java.

  7.3.2 Voicing and aspiration

  Any account of voicing in stop consonants runs the risk of confusing the reader because the terms voiced and voiceless are used in two distinct ways. On the one hand, they may be used as phonetic terms to designate presence or absence of vocal fold vibration during the consonantal interval. On the other hand, they may be used to refer to opposed members of a phonological contrast which might or might not be pronounced as their labels suggest. For example, English /b d ɡ/ are usually described as ‘voiced Stops’ in opposition to ‘voiceless’ /p t k/ even though they may be produced without any vocal fold vibration during the closure. As in Section 5.2 , I shall use voiced and voiceless

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  Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans

  A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and Proto-Culture. Part I: The Text. Part II: Bibliography, Indexes

  • Thomas V. Gamkrelidze, Vjaceslav V. Ivanov, Nichols Johanna(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The existence of such systems provides good typolog-ical confirmation for our reconstruction of the Indo-European stop system. Table 5 Phonetic and phonological feature matrix for the Proto-Indo-European Stops. (The matrix includes both phonological features and those phonetic features that were essential to the functioning and development of the Proto-Indo-European system; the symbols chosen are maintained throughout the book with optionality of aspiration left unexpressed in Stops of the series II and III.) (p') t' K' bh dh Gh ph t h Kh Syllabicity -Stopness + Voicing (-) Glottalization + Labialization + Dentality (-) Velarity (-) Aspiration (-) + + + + (-) (-) + + + + (-) (-) (-) (-) + (-) + (-) (-) + (-) + (-) (-) (-) (-) ± ± + + + + (-) - - -(-) + (-) (-) (-) (-) + (-) + (-) (-) + ± ± ± ± The three stop series 17 1.3. Phonotactics and combinatory rules for the Indo-European phoneme series 1.3.1. The basic canonical forms of the Indo-European root The allophones of the Stops must have been positionally conditioned when phonemes were combined in the Indo-European word. The conditioning environment could have been either the adjacent phoneme or a more distant one, separated from the stop by an intervening vowel and possibly other phonemes in the same word. In forms with zero grade an otherwise distant conditioning phoneme could become adjacent. The basic phonotactic rules for stop distribution within the word can be formulated as constraints and restrictions on the combinability of phonemes or individual features. A fundamental restriction imposed on the entire stop subsystem was a constraint against combining identical phonemes within the root. It can be formulated as Rule 1 : Rule 1. No two stop phonemes with identical feature values can cooccur in a root of the structure C1VC2-.

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  American English Phonetics and Pronunciation Practice

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

    (Publisher)

  A devoiced consonant is normally shown by means of a subscript circle under the consonant (e.g., [b̥]), but with descending symbols, a superscript circle is used (e.g., [ɡ̊]). In the case of fricatives, the devoicing is greater before a voiceless consonant or pause than after a voiceless consonant or pause. When devoicing occurs, the difference between pairs of voiced and voiceless obstruents is less marked, but the contrast still remains – /b d ɡ ʤ v ð z ʒ/ do not become /p t k ʧ f θ s ʃ/.

  2.5 Stops

  Plosives and affricates make up the category of Stops. They have in common a combination of a velic closure and a closure in the oral cavity that results in a complete obstruction to the airstream (hence the term stop).

  English has three pairs of voiceless and voiced plosives at the bilabial, alveolar, and velar places of articulation.

  • For /p/ and /b/, the lips come together and form a complete closure, stopping the airstream (see Figure 2.3 ).
  • For /t/ and /d/, a complete closure is formed by the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge and by the sides of the tongue against the upper side teeth (see Figure 2.4 ).
  • For /k/ and /ɡ/, the back of the tongue forms a closure against the soft palate, and the rear of the sides of the tongue form a seal against the rear upper side teeth (see Figure 2.5 ).

  Figure 2.3 English plosives /p/ and /b/

  Figure 2.4 English plosives /t/ and /d/

  Figure 2.5 English plosives /k/ and /ɡ/

  English has a single pair of voiceless and voiced affricates at the palato-alveolar place of articulation.

  • For /ʧ/ and /ʤ/, the tip and blade of the tongue form a closure against the rear part of the alveolar ridge, the front of the tongue is raised towards the hard palate, and the sides of the tongue form a seal against the upper side teeth (see Figure 2.6 ).
  • The closure is released slowly, resulting in a brief moment of homorganic friction (Figure 2.7 ).
  • The primary articulation is accompanied by a simultaneous secondary articulation – rounding and protrusion of the lips.

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