Phonetics the Science of Speech

Phonetics This page intentionally left blank Phonetics The Science of Speech Martin J. Ball School of Psychology and Communication, University of Ulster at Jordanstown and Joan Rahilly School of English, The Queen's University of Belfast First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Arnold, a member of the Hodder Headline Group, Published in 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 ThirdAvenue,New YorkNY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1999 Martin J. Ball and Joan Rahilly All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the Uni ted Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency: 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. The advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of going to press, but neither the authors nor the publisher can accept any legal reponsibility or li ability for any errors or omissions. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-340-70009-9 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-340-70010-5 (pbk) Production Editor: Liz Gooster Production Controller: Priya Gohil Cover Design: Terry Griffiths Typeset in l1/13pt Sabon by J&L Composition Ltd, Filey, North Yorkshire Contents Introduction 1 1 The anatomy and physiology of speech 4 Introduction 4 The vocal tract 5 The respiratory system 6 The laryngeal system 8 The supralaryngeal system 11 Monitoring speech 13 2 Initiation of speech 18 Introduction 18 Airstream mechanisms 19 Phonation 29 3 Speech articulation 40 Introduction 40 Consonant and vowel 41 State oE the velum 44 Direction oE airflow 45 Force oE articulation 46 Prolongability 47 Manner oE articulation 48 Place oE articulation 53 Three-term labels 59 4 Segments of speech: obstruent consonants 62 Introduction 62 Stop production 62 vi Contents Fricatives 74 Ejectives 80 Implosives 80 Clicks 82 5 Segments of speech: sonorant cosonants and vowels 85 Introduction 85 Nasals 85 Approximants 87 Vowels 91 6 Suprasegments of speech 103 Introduction 103 The importance oE prosodie aspects oE speech 104 Stress 105 Length 107 Syllable juncture 109 Pitch 110 Intonation 113 Voice quality 116 Rhythm 119 7 Multiple articulations, co-articulation and the parameters of speech 123 Introduction 123 Double articulations 123 Secondary articulations 125 Co-articulation 128 Parametrie phonetics 133 8 Principles and methods of phonetic transcription 139 Introduction 139 A note on phonetic ability 139 The role oE auditory transcription in phonetics 140 Terminology relating to transcription 140 Phonemic and phonetic transcription 141 Learning transcriptional skills: the contribution oE auditory and articulatory phonetics and phonology 143 The phoneme and phonemic analysis 145 Do we store sounds as phonemes or allophones? 147 What do we need to transeribe? 148 Materials Eor learning phonetic transcription 148 Contents vii 9 Acoustic characteristics of speech 154 Introduction 154 The acoustics oE speech transmission 155 Frequency and pitch 159 Amplitude, intensity and loudness 160 Resonance 160 Basic methods in acoustic analysis 162 Measuring Erequency 162 Detailed spectrographic properties oE speech sounds 164 Measuring pitch 170 Acoustic aspects oE connected speech 173 10 The perception of speech 178 Introduction 178 How listeners hear speech 179 The peripheral auditory system 179 The internal auditory system 182 Hearing impairment 183 Models oE speech perception 186 11 Perceptual phonetics 191 Introduction 191 Methods oE psychoacoustic investigation 191 Experimental procedures in psychoacoustics 194 Acoustic cues in speech perception 196 Conclusion 199 12 Instrumental phonetics 201 Introduction 201 Muscle control Eor speech 202 Airflow in speech 203 Phonation 204 Velic action 211 Articulation 213 Tracking 216 Imaging 218 Conclusion 223 Appendix 1: Phonetics charts 225 Appendix 2: Languages cited in the text 226 References 233 Index 237 Acknowledgements We were fortunate to be able to discuss various aspects of this book with colleagues, and would like to thank them in particular as well as those whose general advice has been put to good use in preparing the text. We would also like to express our gratitude to those who helped in providing illustrations. Thanks, then, to Evelyn Abberton, Martin Barry, John Esling, Adrian Fourcin, Vince Gracco, Fiona Gibbon, Bill Hardcastle, Barry Heselwood, Sara Howard, Ray Kent, John Laver, John Local, Nicole Müller, Maureen Stone, Paul Tench, Tony Traill, Nigel Vincent, and David Zajac. Unfortunately, we are unable to lay remaining shortcomings in the book at their dOOf. We would also like to thank current and former staff at Arnold - especially Naomi Meredith and Christina Wipf-Perry - for commissioning the book, and for their help in seeing it through to publication. Introduction This book is about phonetics, but what does this term signiEy? As our sub tide suggests, we define phonetics as 'the scientific study oE speech'; but to understand this we need to think about both what we mean by speech, but also what we mean by scientific. By 'speech', we mean all the sounds used to represent the words and other units oE language. Furthermore, we don't just mean the English lan guage, but all the languages oE the world. There are some sounds we can make easily enough (such as the various raspberry-type noises) that do not occur in any known language (though it's always possible we may one day discover a language that does use so me oE these!). So these sounds do not normally co me under consideration by phoneticians. There are also sounds that can only be produced by people with an abnormal cranioEacial devel opment (such as a deEt palate). These sounds are oE interest to the clinical phonetician (see Ball, 1993), but are normally not dealt with by the general phonetician. By 'scientific' we mean that the phonetician is concerned with an objec tive description oE how speech works, measuring speech characteristics as accurately as possible, and providing an account using agreed and under stood terminology. The phonetician is not concerned with subjective accounts oE speech, oE the type 'this sound/accent/speaker is uglierlnicerl more refined than that'. We are not in the business oE saying any one Eorm oE speech is in any way better than any other. OE course, such attitudes are common among laypeople, with prejudices usually based not on the intrin sic qualities oE the sounds themselves but on people's views oE the area/social dass/personal attributes oE the speakers oE the variety in 2 Introduction question. This phenomenon is certainly of interest to sociolinguists (the term 'sociophonetics' has been proposed for such studies), but is usually feIt to be outside the domain of mainstream phonetics. We must always remember that, just as Ianguage is a symbol system whereby a word stands for an item or concept (i.e. it is not the same as the item itself), so speech is also a symbol system. The spoken word represents the word just as the word represents the item. We can show this by noting a variety of ways in which a word can be represented. We can speak it of course, but we could also write it down, sign it using sign Ianguage, send it by morse code or semaphore (although so me of these alternatives are, of course, derived from speech or writing). Speech can be thought of as the primary symbol system of Ianguage, but it is not the only one. We have just mentioned the link between speech and Ianguage. At this point, then, we need to consider that the study of speech abilities in general differs from the study of the speech of a specific Ianguage, or of speech pat terns in groups of Ianguages. 'Phonetics' is the study of speech in general: the whole range of possible human speech sounds, how they are produced, their acoustic characteristics, how they are heard and perceived. When we study the sound system of a specific Ianguage, we are interested not in these features, but in how sounds pattern together to make units, the number and type of consonants and voweis the Ianguage has, the permitted ordering of sounds in words, the meaning associated with specific intonation patterns, and so on. This area of study is termed 'phonology'. We do not discuss phonology in any detail in this book as this is a text on phonetics. Nevertheless, we do need to grasp one important phonolog ical concept, as it affects our decision-making regarding how detailed our descriptions of certain sounds should be. This is the notion of 'contrastiv ity'. The point of contrastivity is that two phonetically different sounds may occur in two different Ianguages, but only in one will they contrast, and so distinguish one word from another. We can illustrate this with an example: in English the '1' at the beginning of the word 'Ieaf' (a clear-I) is different from the '1' at the end of the word 'feei' (a dark-I) in most accents (try saying these carefully to hear the difference). This difference in English is not contrastive, however, because it is a positional variant: the clear-I always occurs at the beginning of syllabies, and the dark-I at the end, so we can never find a pair of words contrasted only by the use of one or other of these types of '1'.

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