Week 1

Question 1

Phonetics and Phonology

Answer 1

The scientific disciplines concerned with speech sounds and sound systems in human language.”

Question 2

International Phonetic Alphabet – IPA

Answer 2

symbols for transcribing speech sounds scientifically

Question 3

phones

Answer 3

Actual speech sounds

Question 4

contrastive pairs of phones

Answer 4

– e.g. English [b] and [m]

swapping them can change a word [bæt] – [mæt]

Question 5

non-contrastive pairs of phones

Answer 5

– e.g. English [n] and [n̪]
they mainly just occur in different contexts from one another
• (English dental [n̪] occurs before ‘th’ sounds)
• Other languages are different – in Yandruwandha [n] and [n̪] are contrastive

Question 6

Three domains of investigation of phonetics:

Answer 6

• Articulation — how we produce speech sounds
• Acoustics — properties of sound waves
• Perception — how we perceive speech sounds

Question 7

voiced sounds

Answer 7

• Vocal cords vibrating: voiced sounds like [v]

Question 8

voiceless sounds

Answer 8

Vocal cords apart: voiceless sounds like [f]

Question 9

• Two kinds of articulators

Answer 9

Articulators control the shape of the vocal tract
• Active articulators move
• Passive articulators do not

Question 10

labial

Answer 10

• lips

Question 11

dental

Answer 11

• teeth

Question 12

lingual

Answer 12

• tongue

Question 13

apical

Answer 13

tongue tip (apex)

Question 14

laminal

Answer 14

tongue blade (lamina)

Question 15

dorsal

Answer 15

tongue back/body (dorsum)

Question 16

radical

Answer 16

tongues root

Question 17

palatal

Answer 17

hard palate

Question 18

velar

Answer 18

soft palate (velum)

Question 19

uvular

Answer 19

uvula

Question 20

superlaryngeal

Answer 20

the whole vocal tract

Question 21

Acoustic phonetics

Answer 21

study of sound as it travels

Question 22

• Ways of looking at sound waves:

Answer 22

• waveforms
-hard to read
-often don’t provide the visual information we want
• spectrograms

Question 23

spectograms

Answer 23

Spectrograms show energy at different frequencies
• Spectrogram → amount of energy in the sound-wave at different frequencies
• Speech sounds → built of many different frequencies
• each has a certain energy level that changes over time
• Different speech sounds → different energy levels at different frequencies
(darker = higher energy)