Phonetics Lecture Notes

Overview of Phonetics

• Phonetics studies human speech from three viewpoints:
  • Articulatory Phonetics: How speech sounds are produced.
  • Auditory Phonetics: How humans perceive speech sounds.
  • Acoustic Phonetics: The physical properties of speech.
• Mnemonic: Use the letter 'P' for Production, Perception, and Physics to remember the branches.

Articulatory Phonetics

• Focuses on the production of speech sounds including vowels (e.g., 'e', 'u') and consonants ('pa', 'ah').
• Involves understanding speech anatomy:
  • Lungs: Produce energy in the form of an airstream.
  • Larynx: Modifies the airstream, responsible for phonation.
  • Vocal Tract: Modulates airstream with articulators.
  • Active Articulators: Four main articulators modify the airstream.
• Airstream Mechanisms:
  • Aggressive Pulmonic: Outward air from lungs (common in all languages).
  • Ingressive Pulmonic: Inward air (less common, e.g., sobbing).
  • Glottalic Air Streams: Includes aggressive (e.g., 'ka', 'ta') and ingressive sounds.
  • Velaric Air Stream: Used in sounds like clicks, not aggressive.

Vowels and Consonants

• Vowels: Free air passage through vocal tract (e.g., 'e').
• Consonants: Obstruction in the air passage (e.g., 'k' in 'car').
• Suprasegmental Features:
  • Stress, loudness, pitch, and length affect sequences of segments.
  • Comparable to musical features like crescendo or diminuendo.

Auditory Phonetics

• Investigates human speech perception.
• Involves anatomy and physiology of the ear and brain.
• Studies what we perceive in speech and how it is perceived.
• Related to speech perception.

Acoustic Phonetics

• Studies physical properties of speech signals.
• Analyzes frequency patterns, friction noise.
• Complicated by factors like background noise and anatomical differences.

Future Topics

• Future lectures will cover:
  • Details of articulatory phonetics.
  • Segmental and suprasegmental phonetics.
  • Stress, pitch, loudness.
  • Examples from the language index of the Virtual Linguistics Campus.
• Access to interactive consonantal and vowel charts through the Virtual Linguistics Campus.

Conclusion

• This lecture was an overview of phonetics.
• Encouragement to join future e-lectures on the Virtual Linguistics Campus.