Languages & Linguistics
Vowels
Vowels are speech sounds produced without any significant constriction or closure in the vocal tract. They are a fundamental component of all spoken languages and are characterized by the absence of any audible friction or noise. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), vowels are represented by a distinct set of symbols that indicate their specific articulatory and acoustic properties.
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eBook - PDFA Manual of English Phonetics and Phonology
Twelve Lessons with an Integrated Course in Phonetic Transcription
- Paul Skandera, Peter Burleigh(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Narr Francke Attempto Verlag(Publisher)
Lesson Four: Vowels The description of Vowels We briefly introduced the notion of the vowel [from Latin vocalis, ‘vocal’] in Lesson Three. Thus you already know that, (a) phonetically, Vowels are produced without any obstruction of air, and, (b) phonologically, Vowels usually occupy the centre of a syllable. Even though most languages have over twice as many consonants as Vowels, in a way, Vowels can be seen as predominant: They carry most of the loudness, pitch, and tone of voice that we per- ceive in concrete utterances, and since their sound quality varies considerably from region to region, Vowels make up most of the characteristics that distinguish different accents of the same language. Different accents may even have different vowel systems. The typical Scottish pronunciation of English, for example, has only 10 vowel phonemes whereas RP has 12. The predominance of Vowels is also reflected in the origin of the word consonant: It comes from the Latin word consonans, which means ‘sounding together’. This implies that consonants do not comfortably occur alone. They usually sound together with Vowels. What are the criteria that we use to describe English vowel phonemes? We noted in Lesson Two that loudness, pitch, tone of voice, and duration are suitable criteria to describe concrete speech sounds, or phones, but these features cannot distinguish phonemes. Length has proved to be a rather unreliable feature, and so has voicing. It is important to note, here, that all English Vowels are typically voiced, so that voicing would not count as a distinctive feature anyway. The same is true of the air-stream mechanism since all English sounds are made with egressive pulmonic air.
eBook - PDF- Victor Yngve, Zdzislaw Wasik(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
1. Physical description of Vowels The following is a brief tutorial on the typical ways in which Vowels have been described in articulatory and acoustic terms to aid those without phonetic training in understanding the work outlined below. 50 ¥ LAURA L. KOENIG As in any review, this description is simplified, and omits many details not critical for present purposes. More extensive discussions of vowel description can be found in introductory phonetics texts (e.g. Ladefoged 1993; MacKay 1987). The relationships between vowel articulation and acoustics have been explored by many researchers over the years, including Chiba and Kajiyama (1941), Fant (1960), Gay, Boe, and Perrier (1992), Lindblom and Sundberg (1971), and Stevens and House (1961). Vowels can be defined simply as linguistic sounds produced with a relatively open vocal tract and little impedance to airflow. Three articulatory parameters that differentiate Vowels in many languages of the world are (a) the degree of opening of the jaw-tongue complex; (b) the relative position of the tongue mass in the supralaryngeal vocal tract; and (c) the configuration of the lips. The first dimension is usually referred to as vowel height: high Vowels have relatively high jaw-tongue positions, whereas low Vowels are more open. Raising the tongue from the floor of the mouth also tends to draw the root of the tongue forward and expand the pharyngeal cavity, so some authors speak in terms of tongue root position or pharyngeal width (e.g. Lindau 1979). The second dimension has to do with whether the bulk of the tongue is shifted towards the alveopalatal region (front Vowels) or the velar/uvular region (back Vowels). Lip configurations usually include rounded or unrounded/spread. Much of the variation in these three articulatory parameters is reflected acoustically in the first and second resonant (or formant) frequencies of the vocal tract (Fl and F2, respectively).
- Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, , Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
(The vocal cords and larynx are not specifically labeled in the figure.) Consonants The sounds of all languages fall into two classes: consonants and Vowels. Con- sonants are produced with some restriction or closure in the vocal tract that impedes the flow of air from the lungs. In phonetics, the terms consonant and vowel refer to types of sounds, not to the letters that represent them. In speaking of the alphabet, we may call a a vowel and c a consonant, but that means only that we use the letter a to represent vowel sounds and the letter c to represent consonant sounds. Place of Articulation Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue tak- ing a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Lolita, 1955 We classify consonants according to where in the vocal tract the airflow restriction occurs, called the place of articulation. Movement of the tongue and lips creates the constriction, reshaping the oral cavity in various ways to produce the various sounds. We are about to discuss the major places of articulation. As you read the description of each sound class, refer to Table 5.1, which provides key words containing the sounds. As you pro- nounce these words, try to feel which articulators are moving. (Watch- ing yourself in a mirror helps, too.) Look at Figure 5.1 for help with the terminology. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
- 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.
- Felicity Cox, Janet Fletcher(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
The vowel space is determined by the vowel limit, which is the point beyond which Vowels cannot be produced. For instance, decreasing the distance between the tongue and the hard palate during the production of /iː/ will only be possible until a point is reached where a vowel is no longer produced and instead the resulting sound is a consonant like /j/ or even a palatal fricative. The auditory quality of Vowels is determined largely (but not exclusively) by the position of the tongue within this vowel space. Vowels produced in close proximity to one another within the space sound similar to each other, whereas those separated from each other in space sound different from each other. For example, the Vowels /iː/ as in beat and /ɪ/ as in bit sound similar to each other as they are produced in a similar articula- tory position, but they sound different from /æ/ as in bat, which is created with a very different articulatory position. Languages prefer to structure their vowel systems so that Vowels are well dispersed around the space. This distribution enhances intelligibility by creating a vowel system that has auditorily different Vowels, which are therefore more easily differentiated. Some languages have very small vowel inventories. For example, many Australian Aboriginal languages have just three Vowels in contrast to their extensive consonant systems. Regardless of the inventory size, Vowels are distributed to assist intelligibility by differing in their height and backness characteristics. By convention, the vowel space is illustrated using a two- dimensional representation with high front Vowels positioned at the top left, high back Vowels at the top right, low front Vowels at the bottom left and low back Vowels at the bottom right. See Figure 2.22. 2.7.2 Vowel characteristics For the description of consonants we identified features relating to the characteristics of voicing, place and manner. We can also describe Vowels in terms of their articulatory features.
eBook - PDF- Lynne Cahill(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
But when a syllable is unstressed, the vowel in it will often come out without much effort, and so it is a schwa. I talk a lot more about how, when and why this happens in English in chapter 7 , but for now you just need to know that, when you hear a vowel which doesn’t seem to involve any effort with either lips or tongue, it’s probably a schwa. 4.5 Lexical sets One way that linguists find to talk about the Vowels of English without hav-ing to get too tied up in the precise articulation is by using what are called lexical sets . These were proposed by John Wells (1982) and are very widely used to refer to Vowels. The idea is that it is possible to identify sets of words which always have the same vowel, even though the actual vowel may be different in different accents. Table 4.2 gives the lexical sets with their head word in small capitals and a few example words with each vowel. For most people there are pairs of sets which have the same vowel, but that is the point. With these sets it is possible to talk about the differences between different accents. For example, most SSBE speakers have differ-ent Vowels for bath and trap, but speakers with northern English accents usually have the same vowel for those two sets. For some, the words in one or more of the sets might not have the same vowel (cure is particularly problematic here). This is more of a problem, and shows that pronunciation changes over time and can affect different words in different ways. O’Grady (2013, p. 154) has a nice table with the typical Vowels for all of the sets in 10 different accents of English. 4.6 Acoustics Unlike consonants Vowels can be very accurately identified and mapped by taking acoustic measurements. If you think about singing a musical note and holding the note for a time, it’s a vowel sound that you’ll hold the note on (usually). That means that it’s possible to detect the tune, or pitch, of vowel sounds.
eBook - PDFCalvert's Descriptive Phonetics
Introduction and Transcription Workbook
- Pamela G. Garn-Nunn(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Thieme(Publisher)
OVERVIEW: Vowels AND CONSONANTS TRADITIONAL ANALYSIS OF Vowels CONCEPT QUESTIONS OVERVIEW: Vowels AND CONSONANTS Speech sounds, or phonemes, traditionally have been divided into two categories, consonants and Vowels, with Vowels further subdivided into monophthongs and diphthongs. Although this book uses this classification system as a reference for this chapter and Chapter 4, many phoneticians have disagreed over the definitions and identities of these two categories.You might find that hard to understand because in many cases the differences between consonants and Vowels seem very obvious. For example, the consonant /t/ is short in duration and does not require vocal fold vibration. Unlike consonants, the Vowels are usually longer in duration and are all voiced. But in contrast to the example with /t/, many consonants resemble Vowels in characteristics such as voicing and oral resonance. Some consonants are very sim-ilar to Vowels, for example /w/ ( w ing , w eb ) and /j/ ( y es , y o y o ). Both /w/ and /j/ are voiced, both have oral resonance, and both are initiated from a high vowel posi-tion.The /j/ begins in a position very similar to /i/ and the /w/ begins in a position similar to /u/. (See Chapter 4, section Approximants/Oral Resonant Consonants, for a full explanation.) Nevertheless, there are several ways that phoneticians have typically distinguished Vowels from consonants: (1) their role in syllable formation, (2) the degree of vocal tract constriction, and (3) classification schemes. R OLE IN S YLLABLE F ORMATION One of the most commonly used and agreed upon ways to distinguish between vow-els and consonants has been their different roles in syllable formation. With very few exceptions (see Chapter 5), only a vowel can be a syllable nucleus. Thus, a single vowel can constitute a full syllable, for example /a ɪ /( eye , I ). Consonants may be added to a vowel, for example /ha ɪ /, /la ɪ / ( high , lie ), but they are not required for syllable formation.
eBook - ePub- Bruce M. Rowe, Diane P. Levine(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The articulation of Vowels is more difficult to describe because, unlike consonants, Vowels involve no obstruction of the airstream. Therefore, it is more difficult to tell what configurations the speech organs are in when producing Vowels. The vibration of the air caused by the vibration of the vocal folds, along with the factors listed below, creates the vowel sounds. Because a main mechanism of vowel production for most vowel sounds is vibrating vocal folds, most Vowels are voiced. Voiceless Vowels do occur in English but only under special circumstances. Some languages have voiceless Vowels as a regular part of their sound systems.The other factors involved in vowel production are- which resonance chamber is used – the oral cavity, or both the oral and nasal cavities.
- the shape of the resonance chamber, which is affected by tongue height, tongue advancement (front to back), and lip rounding or spreading.
The oral and nasal cavities
We can divide Vowels into oral Vowels and nasalized Vowels. Oral Vowels occur when the velum is raised, cutting off the entry of the airstream into the nasal cavity. Nasalized Vowels are created when the velum lowers, permitting the airstream to flow through both the oral and nasal cavities. In English, Vowels are almost always oral. However, nasalization of Vowels occurs before nasal consonants. Can you hear the difference in the vowel sound (phonetically symbolized as [æ]) in hat [hæt] and ham [hæ̃m]? The [æ̃] in ham employs the nasal cavity in its production. Can you hear this contrast in the Vowels in seat [sit] and seam [sim]? The diacritic mark [˜] I indicates nasalization.Vowels and the shape of the resonance cavity
Figure 2.3
eBook - PDFEnglish Language, The
From Sound to Sense
- Gerald P. Delahunty, James J. Garvey(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Parlor Press, LLC(Publisher)
97 Phonetics and Phonology Exercise You should now be able to provide an articulator description for each of the following sounds. Consult Tables 1-3. [ t ] [ k ] [ b ] [ d ] [g] Voicing Place Manner Nasality Example word [ n ] [ N ] [ f ] [ v ] [ T ] Voicing Place Manner Nasality Example word [ð] [ s ] [ z ] [ S ] [ Z ] Voicing Place Manner Nasality Example word [ tS ] [ dZ ] [ l ] [ r ] [ h ] Voicing Place Manner Nasality Example word [ w ] [ j ] Voicing Place Manner Nasality Example word Delahunty and Garvey 98 Vowels Vowels include the sounds we ordinarily represent as the letters , as well as a number of other sounds for which the ordinary alphabet has no unique symbols. Vowels are distinguished from consonants in several ways. As we have seen, consonants are produced by constricting the airstream to various de-grees as it flows through the oral tract. Vowels are produced with a smooth, unobstructed airflow through the oral tract. Differences in vowel quality are produced by different shapes of the oral cavity. Characteristic vowel qualities are determined by (a) the height of the tongue in the mouth; (b) the part of the tongue raised (front, middle, or back); (c) the configuration of the lips; and (d) the tension of the muscles of the oral tract. An articulatory description of a vowel must include all of these features. Tongue height Pronounce the words eat and at . Now pronounce just the Vowels of these two words. Notice that as you go from the vowel of eat to the vowel of at , your mouth opens. If this is not obvious to you just by playing with these two Vowels, look in a mirror as you produce them. Alternate the words, and then just the two Vowels. Once you’ve become accustomed to the different degrees of openness of these two Vowels, pronounce ate between eat and at . The degree of open-ness of its vowel falls between those of eat and at , so there is a continuous increase in mouth openness as you go from one vowel to another.
eBook - PDF- Ralph W. Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
1 The sounds of language KEY TERMS • acoustic phonetics • active and passive articulators • allophone • alternation • articulatory phonetics • complementary distribution • derivation • distinctive features • fundamental frequency • formant • intonation • manner of articulation • minimal pair • natural class • obstruent • phoneme • phonology • phonotactic constraint • pitch track • place of articulation • sonorant • sonority • source-fi lter theory • spectrogram • stress • suprasegmentals • syllable structure • tone • vocal tract • voicing • waveform CHAPTER PREVIEW This chapter is about the sounds of speech. Without sound, communication can still take place – with a nod or a wave, a photograph, or a drawing. There can even be language without sound: those who cannot hear use languages based on manual signs instead. Yet for most of us most of the time, getting our message across involves encoding it in sounds. Even when we write, we use symbols that are based on speech (though sometimes not very directly). The study of the sounds of speech can be divided into the disciplines of phonetics and phonology . Phonetics studies speech sounds as physical objects. Phoneticians ask questions such as: • How are speech sounds made? • How do physical characteristics make people sound different? • How many different sounds do languages use? • How are different languages and dialects distinguished by the sounds they use? • How does sound travel through the air? • How is it registered by the ears? • How can we measure speech? Phonology studies how languages organize sounds into different patterns.
eBook - PDFLanguage Files
Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 13th Edition
- Department of Linguistics(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Ohio State University Press(Publisher)
Yet another way we can distinguish Vowels and consonants is the role each one plays in a syllable. A syllable is a unit of speech—every utterance contains at least one syllable. A syllable may contain only a single sound or several sounds, as in the monosyllabic words uh Representing Speech Sounds 43 File 2.1 [] and sprints [spɹInts]. A syllable can be broken down into an onset and a rhyme. The rhyme consists of the vowel and any consonants that come after it—the segments that match in words that we think of as rhyming (such as man, can, and plan)—while any con- sonants that occur before the rhyme within the syllable form the onset (such as man, can, and plan). All syllables have a rhyme, but onsets are optional in some languages. The rhyme can be further broken down into the nucleus, the vocalic or vowel-like part of rhyme, and the coda, which consists of any final consonants. The structure of a syllable is shown in (2). The syllable nucleus is the “heart” of the syllable, carrying most of the suprasegmental information such as stress, volume, and pitch, which Vowels are much better suited to do than consonants. Consonants usually do not function as the nucleus of the syllable (though see Section 2.2.5 for syllabic consonants), while Vowels do not function as onsets. Vowels in turn are often divided into two categories: monophthongs ([mAn@fTAŋz] or [mAn@pTAŋz]) and diphthongs ([dIfTAŋz] or [dIpTAŋz]). You can think of monophthongs as simple Vowels, composed of a single configuration of the vocal tract, while diphthongs are complex Vowels, composed of a sequence of two different configurations. We consider diphthongs to be “single” Vowels, however, because the sequence of configurations acts as the nucleus to a single syllable. To conceptualize this better, think of the two words knives and naive.
eBook - PDFPhonetics
Transcription, Production, Acoustics, and Perception
- Henning Reetz, Allard Jongman(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Sounds with a full or partial obstruction in the vocal tract, made by the tongue and lips, are called consonants . These are categorized in a two‐ dimensional grid by the manner of articulation , that is, the extent of the obstruc-tion, and by the place of articulation , where the obstruction is made. Important for this categorization is the tongue, which is segmented into tongue tip, blade, body (front, center, back), and tongue root . Places of articulation are ordered from the front of the mouth along the roof of the mouth down to the pharynx, yielding for Articulatory Phonetics 2 10 Articulatory Phonetics English labial, labio‐dental, dental, alveolar, postalveolar, palatal, labial‐velar, velar, and glottal . Ordering manner of articulation in terms of the degree of obstruction yields an (oral) stop (or plosive ) , nasal (stop), fricative, affricate, and approximant . Stops have a complete closure of the vocal tract, where nasals have an open nasal tract. For fricatives, the articulators come close together to create a narrow channel and airflow through this passage produces a hissing sound. Affricates are a combination of a plosive immediately followed by a fricative. And approximants are marked by a somewhat wider opening of the oral tract, so that no hissing sound is produced. When the articulators are even further apart, Vowels are produced. Vowels are also categorized in basically three dimensions: a horizontal dimension depending on the frontness or backness of the tongue, a vertical dimension depending on the height of the tongue, resulting in labels such as high , mid , or low , and a third dimension, which expresses whether the lips are rounded or unrounded . For some Vowels, tense and lax varieties exist, which differ in qualities that will be described in Section 3.3. Additionally, the nasal tract is open when producing nasal or nasal-ized Vowels.
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