LING1111 - (vowels) articulators Flashcards
Vowel
A sound produced without significant constriction of the air flowing through the oral cavity. Vowel sounds form the centres of syllables.
HPT
The apex of the arch is the Highest Point of the Tongue
Rounded vowel
A vowel sound produced with rounded lips
[ʉː] - oo - bʉːt (boot)
Front vowel
A vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned forward in the mouth [iː] - ea - piːt (peat)
[æ] - a
Monophthong
A simple vowel produced with a relatively stable articulatory position, e.g e in bed.
Diphthong
a dynamic vowel produced by the movement of the articulators from one position to another, as in by, bough, bay.
Tense/lax vowels
Features that divide vowels into two classes based on length; tense vowels are generally longer in duration than the corresponding lax vowels.
Stress/stressed syllable
A syllable with relatively greater length, more extreme values of pitch and/ or (to a lesser extent) increased loudness than other surrounding syllables, and therefore perceived as prominent; also called (prosodic) accent.
Prosodic/suprasegmental feature
An aspect of speech beyond the speech segment, including rhythm, stress and intonation patterns.
Syllable
A phonological unit composed of one or more speech sounds, one of which must be a vowel or vowel-like element in the phonetic output. Words are composed of one or more syllables.
Geminate
A sequence of two identical sounds that differ only in length; the long consonant is denoted either by writing the phonetic symbol twice as in [sakki] or by use of a length diacritic as in [sakːi].
Tone language
A language in which the tone or pitch on a syllable is phonemic, so that words with identical segments but different tones have different meanings, e.g in Thai [naa] with falling pitch means ‘face’, but with a rising pitch means ‘thick’.
Register/level tones
A relatively stable (non-gliding) pitch on syllables of tone languages.
Contour tone
A tone in which the pitch glides from one level to another, e.g from low to high as in a rising tone.
Downdrift
The gradual lowering of the absolute pitch of tones during an utterance in a tone language. During downdrift, tones retain their relative values to one another.
