English Phonetics and Phonology Lecture A6 English Phonetics and Phonology

Vowel possibilities! In this lecture we will learn… Use this information to compare to consonant possibilities (A5)

With consonants… With consonants… distinct articulation of speech organs

With vowels… This is less clear… and complex in different ways. For articulation… all vowels are approximants

approximants… All we can do is distinguish broadly if they the… Front Centre or Back of tongue raised towards top of mouth

Voicing? Energy? With vowels… voicing and energy don’t really help us understand how to make vowel sounds. Vowels are typically voiced… so can’t really contrast voiced/unvoiced… fortis/lenis

So how… (can we understand????] Acoustic information But acoustic information takes a long time to study and requires lengthy scientific detail. So how can we actually apply this to us?

Physical variables Combination of articulatory and auditory criteria

Tongue shape

Activity

activity

… the moving tongue…

…tongue parts…

So far… Open and close Front and back

Cardinal vowels (Cv)

Upper vowel limit

Lower vowel limit

Considering limits We call this the vowel area. You will see three possible ways to draw the vowel area.

Drawing vowels

All together now!

Lip Shape Changing the shape of your lips will change the quality of vowel sounds. Lip rounding… 1) opens up space inside the mouth 2) or closes up space inside the mouth Try it!

Unrounded / rounded

Steady-state, diphthong

Duration

In other words… Duration, like other parts of language study, should NOT be done in isolation. Sentence stress > word stress Reading books > memorizing list of vocab Long listening exercise (like TOEFL) > short listening (like TOEIC) Relationship of length in vowel sounds > length in vowel sounds alone