Lecture 1 (the production of speech sounds) Flashcards
describe the flow of air coming from your lungs in speech production
pulmonic eggressive air stream
what is an example of an ingressive air stream in french speech?
oui of agreement
give an example of a para-linguistic sound
tutting
describe the larynx
the hollow muscular organ forming an air passage to the lungs and holding the vocal cords. Also known as the voice box.
What is the primary role of the vocal folds?
to trap oxygen to hold your breath by closing off the trachea/ wind pipe
describe the epiglottis
a flap of cartilage at the root of the tongue, which is depressed during swallowing to cover the opening of the windpipe
describe the nasopharnyx
the upper part of the pharynx, connecting with the nasal cavity above the soft palate.
Links the throat and nasal cavity/
Describe the velum
the soft palate. A soft, flexible muscle which can open or close the naso-pharynx
Is the difference between /p/ and /b/ phonological? Why?
Yes, as it can affect the meaning of a word
cf. pois, bois
In French, is the difference between the [r] rolled and the [R] phonological?
No, as it does not affect the meaning of a word, unlike in a language such as Spanish: cf: pero, perro
Define: phonological
MEANING
study of speech sounds with reference to their patterning and rules governing pronunciation
phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning.
theoretical linguistics
Define phonetic
PRODUCTION
of or relating to speech sounds, their production, or their transcription in written symbols.
Corresponding to pronunciation
phonetics concerns physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the speech sound.
descriptive linguistics
what is a phoneme?
A phoneme is a sound.
Linguists rather specifically define it as ‘the smallest contrastive unit in the sound systemof a language.’
Phonemes do not carry meaning, yet they combine with other phonemes to form larger meaningful units such as morphemes (the smallest grammatical unit in a language) and words.
Phonemes matter as a change in phoneme could denote a different meaning. For example, the word ‘boy’ vs ‘toy’
from Greek phōnēma sound, speech
what is a grapheme?
A grapheme is the smallest fundamental unit in the written language which could be equivalent to a phoneme that is the smallest contrastive sound unit (spoken language).
Graphemes simply mean the letters or symbols of any writing system in the world.
Grapheme refers to a single letter of the alphabet, but on occasion two or three alphabetic letters could be considered as one grapheme; they are called a digraph and a trigraph respectively.
For example, the word ‘ship’ has four letters and three phonemes /ʃɪp/, yet it has only three graphemes as ‘sh’ is considered as a digraph.
from Greek graphēma a letter
What is the difference between a phone and a phoneme?
A phone is a sound of a language. A phone is transcribed in square brackets [ ]. If someone pronounces papa with a p soufflé you can note if between brackets [PhAPhA] (h being little)
If this concrete variation of pronunciation doesn’t interest me and I only want to consider it from the perspective of linguistic communication, I can transcribe it between slashes /// In this way it is considered from a purely functional, abstract point of view, so is a phoneme.
a phone is a concrete realisation of a phoneme
