1. English Phonetics and Phonology
Lecture A6
English Phonetics and Phonology

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

3. With consonants…
With consonants… distinct articulation of speech organs

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

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

6. 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

7. 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?

8. Physical variables
Combination of articulatory and auditory criteria

9. Tongue shape

10. Activity

11. activity

12. … the moving tongue…

13. …tongue parts…

14. So far…
Open and close
Front and back

15. Cardinal vowels (Cv)

16. Upper vowel limit

17. Lower vowel limit

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

19. Drawing vowels

20. All together now!

21. 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!

22. Unrounded / rounded

23. Steady-state, diphthong

24. Duration

25. 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