Midterm Review

Introduction to Phonetics, L306
R. Port, March 19, 2006

Text Materials:

Transcription:  Be able to transcribe dialects of English using the basic IPA alphabet.  Recognize implosives, ejectives, clicks (labial, lateral and palatal when voiced, voiceless, aspirated and nasal).

Speech anatomy: lips, tongue tip (apex), tongue blade, tongue dorsum, tongue root.  Mouth, nasal cavity, pharynx (nasal and oral), soft palate (velum), hard palate, alveolar ridge.
       Larynx vs. glottis (larynx is cartilage, glottis is a space), vocal folds, false vocal folds, trachea, epiglottis.

Basic symbol set of the IPA (International Phonetic Assoc.) alphabet.

Places of Articulation - at two `levels of detail': Labial, Apical, Palatal, Velar, Glottal, OR bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, retroflex, palato-alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, labiovelar, glottal (Ladef, Table on p. 167)

Manners of Articulation (Chapters 3, 7) (See Table on p. 176): stop, nasal, approximant, fricative, trill, tap, flap, lateral vs. central.  What argument could you raise to claim that the click property is a Manner of Artic? (because they occur at different places, eg, labial, dental, palatal, etc)  What argument could you raise to claim that the click property is a Place of Artic? (because they come in different manners, like nasal, +/- voice, ejective, lateral, etc).

Vowels

Vowel dimensions: tongue height, tongue backness, lip rounding.  For English, how many V dimensions? Only 2? (maybe just height and backness) Or 3? (height, backness, rounding)  Or more? (height, backness, rounding,  length, etc).
Monophthongs vs diphthongs.  Which Vs in English are ambiguous on this property?
`Secondary vowel articulations': nasalization, rhoticism (or retroflexion)
Stressed, unstressed; reduced vowels, full vowel; pitch accent.
Tense Vs, lax Vs; closed vs. open syllables (Which Eng Vs only occur in closed syllables? Which contrasts are usually neutralized before /r/?)

Consonants

Stops, fricatives (obstruents); Essential gestures: oral closure + nasal closure OR glottal closure
Apical stop variants: lateral release (bottle), glottal stop (cotton), flap (or tap) (butter), trill, velar release (sudden)
Homorganic relationships, voicing pairs. What is coarticulation?
Air stream mechanisms: (pulmonic, glottalic, velaric) X (ingressive, egressive).  Plosive, Ejective, Implosive, Click.
Voice-onset time: Continuous, in fact, but across languages has 3 modes: prevoiced, short-lag (unaspirated), long-lag (aspirated). Eng vs. French VOT patterns.
Other `voicing' cues for English: vowel duration and obstruent duration for postvocalic obstruents.
Affricates vs. fricatives (note spelling!)
Breathy-voiced stops (voiced aspirates) (eg, in what languages?)
Glottal articulations:  [h] vs. voiceless vs. voiced (laryngealized voice, glottal fry, breathy voice, etc)
Be familiar with the major English `allophonic variants' of vowels and consonants (pp. 71-76).

Port's `Continuous-Time English Speech Production Model'

Based on a set of `independent articulatory systems': Lips, Tongue-tip, Tongue-body, Velum, Vocal-folds. Each of these dimensions (or systems) is largely independent of the others, and has a limited set of mutually exclusive values.  (Eg, the lips can be open, rounded or closed, but can never be in two states at once.) Each system changes state in continuous time in one (eg, lip rounding) or two (eg, Tongue body position) dimensions. Plots of each articulatory system (reducing each to a single dimension) can be plotted against time (somewhat like a musical score). Be able to draw such plots for single words showing coarticulation, assimilation and certain prominent timing details.

Properties of the IPA phonetic alphabet

Phonology: the application of phonetic sounds for spelling morphemes in languages. Prosody (other than timing)
ToBi Analysis (Tones and Break Indices). This is the most useful method for transcribing English prosody (and some other languages as well).  There are 4 types of tone: Pitch accents (PA) (H* peak, L* low, L*+H scoop, L+H* rising peak, H+!H downstep high), Phrasal tones (H-, L-),  final boundary tones (L%, H%) and initial boundary tones (%H, %L).  Some common patterns are the ``Declarative phrase intonation'' (%L..PA..L-L%), List item intonation (..PA..L-H%) and ``Nuclear accent'' (a pitch accent near the end of an intonation phrase).



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