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Phonetics and Perception:The Deep Case for Phonetics Training

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Phonetics and Perception:The Deep Case for Phonetics Training Peer Reviewed Article by Phil Thompson Phonetics and Perception: The deep case for Phonetics training The International Phonetic Alphabet has become an almost universally accepted tool in teaching speech to actors and is taught in one form or another in most actor training institutions in the United States. Even when there is disagreement about what pronunciation choices should be taught or the best methods for teaching, most speech teachers, and the people who hire them, agree the is something an actor ought to learn. There are some very good, practical arguments to support this point of view. An actor who can read and write in the International Phonetic Alphabet can do a number of useful things. She can: ) Read articles on the topic of speech and accent ) Read pronunciations in pronouncing dictionaries given in ) Make her own notations of sounds she observes in accent source material ) Read pronunciation notes given by a voice coach ) Make note of pronunciations in an accurate and commonly PhilipThompson is the current president of VASTA. understood form He is an Associate Professor at the University of ) Rely on the stability of that written record. California, Irvine where he heads the MFA program in Acting. He works frequently as a voice and dialect coach for theatres such as the Cincinnati Playhouse Certainly, a phonetic alphabet is a wonderful tool, and its practical value in the Park, South Coast Repertory, OperaPacific, alone makes it worthy of study. I believe, however, there are two arguments Pasadena Playhouse and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. He has been a resident vocal coach for 10 for the value of phonetics training that are far more compelling, and my belief seasons at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. He is a in their importance influences the way I teach the material. master teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework and teaches frequently in training workshops around the country. I believe that studying phonetics helps us to untangle perceptual confusions that arise when we compare the sounds we hear and make to our internal model of language. I also believe that training in phonetics enriches an actor’s linguistic inner life, providing useful contextual knowledge and developing skill in perceiving and performing. I’ll even go so far as to say that an enriched perception of the variety of sounds in language builds an actor’s imagination and flexibility. Finally, I feel that these benefits can be maximized in speech training and that improving an actor’s understanding of language variation in general and their own perceptions specifically, should be a goal of speech training for actors. At this point it would be useful to make a few distinctions. It is fairly com- mon practice in writing and speaking about speech training to use the terms phonetics and IPA interchangeably and so far this essay has not distinguished clearly between the two. There are important differences however. Phonetics is the study of the description of speech sounds. The International Phonetic Alphabet ()1 is one means of describing those sounds but the science of 1.This acronym can also stand for the International Phonetics encompasses more than the alone. It would be possible to study Phonetic Association, the body responsible for defin- ing the International Phonetic Alphabet.The Phonetics without the but it would not really be possible to study the Association’s website is without studying Phonetics. For example, one could analyze a speech sound http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html. spectrographically or offer a physical description of the articulatory action that produced a sound. These are methods of describing the sounds of lan- guage without reference to an alphabet. The is a concise symbolic means of referring to and describing those sounds. We could think of a phonetic symbol as a shorthand for the full description of the articulatory action which produces that sound. As a general principle, this alphabet represents each speech sound (called a phone) with a single distinct symbol. The addition of diacritics can further specify features of the sound being described. The entire alphabet and the principles upon which it is based provide a stable, widely accepted system of conventions for describing speech sounds very precisely Pronunciation , Phonetics, Linguistics, Dialect/Accent Studies Phonetics and Perception: The deep case for Phonetics training by Phil Thompson (continued) and concisely. It is the ’s precision in describing subtle variations in sound that is of particular value in clarifying students’ understanding of the sounds they can make. The stability of the arbitrary conventions of the and the lack of ambiguity in the direct correspondence of symbol to sound is extremely valuable in sorting out misunderstandings of listening and speech. Furthermore, the system of knowledge of phonetics as a whole provides a frame of reference that guards against confusion. This confusion is entirely natural and results from the way an untrained listener perceives and thinks about the sounds of language. I find it helpful to classify these confusions as interference . The term interference was used by Uriel Weinreich in Languages in Contact ( ) to describe “instances of deviation from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with 2 more than one language.” More recently, the term transfer has been used and 2. Weinreich, U. Languages in Contact .The Hague: the distinction made between positive transfer of useful knowledge or skill Mouton, 1953, 1. from one’s primary language and negative transfer in which some part of the primary language is used inappropriately in the secondary language. This is essentially the same as interference . I stick to the older word because I am more interested in addressing confusions that occur in the speech work of actors than I am in the larger field of Second Language Acquisition. This essay is not intended to advance or to contradict Weinrich’s arguments about the way languages change by coming into contact through the speakers of those languages. There is already a body of work discussing contact- induced language change and the role of interference. The term is introduced here in an attempt to clarify some issues encountered in speech training for actors. Put simply, the interference I’m interested in is what happens when an actor mistakenly relies on a faulty idea about a pronunciation. For the most part, the challenges that face actors don’t involve learning a second language. Actors, however, regularly deal with questions of pronunciation, whether on the large scale of performing an accent or on the small scale of a single word pronunciation. Actors should have access to a range of speech choices for vocal characterization or intelligibility. They need to perceive speech sounds accurately and be able to repeat, remember and notate them. In a way, actors 3 3. Obviously, there are actors who perform in a sec - are required to negotiate an expanded version of their own primary language. ond, third or fourth language and genres of drama that take a bilingual approach. Although the particu - In tackling this di fficult task, actors deal with two main forms of interference: lar challenges for these actors are interesting, they orthographic interference and phonemic interference. 4 I’ll begin by describ - lie outside the scope of this essay. ing how this interference occurs and I’ll make the case that when actors study 4. Weinreich used the phrase phonic interference the they are inoculated against both. and the accepted term today is phonetic interference . I have again chosen to avoid the most current term of art in part because I can’t be certain Orthography refers to the system of writing with which a language is recorded. that my understanding of the concept matches all Every literate speaker of a language has internalized a set of rules for convert - that is implied by that term in the linguistics litera - ture. I also feel that the word phonemic better ing written words into speakable language. Orthographic interference occurs expresses the problem I’m describing. when the application of normal rules for turning written words into speech leads to errors in pronunciation. A common example of this would be an error made in reading unfamiliar word. A reader encountering the word “mis - led” never having heard it spoken, might very well read it [ maI*z x≥d] Often speakers of a second language apply the reading rules of their first language to words they read in their second language. A native German speaker, Voice and Gender The Voice & Speech Review misapplying German rules to an English word, might read the word “vote” as 5 5.The correct pronunciation is [ davID ]. [fot ]. An English speaker might read the Welsh name “Dafydd” as [ dœfId ]. These errors are the source of some features of foreign accents. But there is another way in which orthographic interference can cause prob - lems when orthography stands in for phonetics. Because actors are preparing a learned, crafted performance they need a way to record pronunciations and represent them to others, in order to consider pronunciation choices and finally to memorize and perform them. To do this, an actor without phonetic training will frequently fall back on the phonetic features of spelling and that can be quite confusing. I had a recent experience that demonstrates the problem. I was coaching Hamlet and I made the decision (a fairly arbitrary one) that we would pro - nounce the word “liege” as [ li ¸] rather than [ liZ ]. I informed the actors of this and other pronunciation choices before our first read-through. After a while I began to hear one actor pronouncing the word [ lig ] At the intermission a few disconcerted actors came up to me to ask if they had misunderstood me.
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