Consonants

8 Key excerpts on "Consonants"

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  eBook - ePub

  Phonetics

  Transcription, Production, Acoustics, and Perception

  • Henning Reetz, Allard Jongman(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  milk can be represented as CVCC.) Sounds are classified as Consonants or vowels mainly on the basis of how they are articulated or produced. For the articulation of vowels, the oral cavity is relatively open – in other words, the airflow is quite unobstructed. In addition, the vocal folds are usually vibrating. For Consonants, on the other hand, the airstream is affected in a number of ways; it can either be:

  1 blocked, resulting in an (oral) stop consonant; 2 impeded, resulting in either a fricative with a major constriction or an approximant with a minor constriction; 3 diverted through the nasal cavity, resulting in a nasal consonant.

  In addition, the vocal folds may or may not be vibrating, resulting in voiced or voiceless (= unvoiced) sounds.

  From now on, speech sounds will be classified as either Consonants or vowels. We will start with the Consonants. In order to produce a consonant, the airstream through the vocal tract must be obstructed in some way. Consonants can therefore be classified according to the location and extent of this obstruction, or, in linguistic terms, the place and manner of articulation. We start by describing the Consonants of English in terms of their place and manner of articulation. In Chapter 4 we expand this description to sounds found in other languages of the world.

  2.3.1 Place of articulation

  Going from front to back in the vocal tract, the following places of articulation can be distinguished in English:

  1 Bilabial. Bilabials are produced with both lips. Examples in English are the initial sounds in the words

  p eak

  ,

  b eak

  , and

  m eek

  .

  2 Labiodental. The lower lip makes contact with the upper front teeth. Examples are the initial sounds in the words

  f ine

  and

  v ine

  .

  3 Dental. Dental Consonants involve the tip or blade of the tongue and the upper front teeth. Examples are the initial sounds in

  th igh

  and

  th y

  .

  4 Alveolar. These sounds involve the tip or blade of the tongue and alveolar ridge as in

  t ip

  ,

  d ip

  ,

  s ip

  ,

  z ip

  ,

  l ip

  ,

  r ip

  , and

  n ip

  . (For a discussion of the retroflex variant of “r,” see Section 3.1.5.)

  5 Postalveolar. These sounds involve the tongue tip or blade and the back of the alveolar ridge. The tongue is raised towards the alveolar ridge and the front of the hard palate. Examples are the initial sounds in s

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  eBook - ePub

  Pronunciation for English as an International Language

  From research to practice

  • Ee-Ling Low(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Consonants DOI: 10.4324/9781315814131-5

  Chapter 2 has given a detailed coverage of what is involved in a full description of the articulation of Consonants, namely voicing, place and manner of articulation. Crystal (2008 , p. 103) considers describing the voicing, place and manner to be part of the phonetic description of Consonants but it is also important to point out that Consonants, unlike vowels, do have a constriction in the airflow caused by the contact with the articulators and, for this reason, we are able to be very specific about their place and manner of articulation. This also makes it easy, if required, to point others to specific places and manner of articulation for producing specific Consonants when learning a new language. This chapter will first talk about some phonological aspects of describing Consonants in English, then go on to point out what recent research has shown about Consonants in different varieties of English in the Outer and Expanding Circles, first starting with the overview offered by Mesthrie (2004) and then moving on to more recent acoustic studies on Consonants in varieties spoken in these two circles. Finally, a discussion of the implications of the research findings for pronunciation practice for EIL will be elucidated.

  Phonological description of Consonants

  As mentioned in Chapter 4 , unlike vowels, Consonants do not form the syllable nuclei. Instead, in English, initial and final consonant clusters do not constitute the obligatory component of the syllable and are optional. Having said that, I had also earlier pointed out in Chapter 4 that, in some cases, Consonants can form the syllable nuclei and when they function in this capacity, they are called syllabic and three main Consonants can fulfil this role, namely syllabic [l, m, n] notated as

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  Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

  • David Hornsby(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Teach Yourself

    (Publisher)

  voiceless. All vowels in English are voiced; Consonants may be voiceless or voiced.

  Speech sounds may also be oral or nasal, depending on whether or not the velum (or soft palate) is lowered to allow air to pass through the nose as well as the mouth. English has only oral vowels, but nasal and oral Consonants; French, Portuguese and Polish have nasal vowels as well as nasal Consonants. Consonants are produced by full or partial obstruction of the airstream, while vowels are produced by positioning the tongue in different configurations which do not impede the flow of air. The distinction, however, is not a clear-cut one and some sounds classified as Consonants have vowel-like qualities.

  You might find it helpful to think in terms of a continuum or sonority hierarchy with highly vocalic or ‘vowel-like’ sounds like [a ] (as in British English ra t) at the top and strongly consonantal sounds like [p ] in p ip at the bottom. Stressed syllables in English must have a vowel as their head or nucleus (see Chapter 5 ), while Slovak, for example, allows sounds further down the sonority hierarchy, such as [r ] in the place name Br no, to occupy this position.

  In general, consonantal sounds show greater constriction of the vocal tract than vocalic sounds and have less prominence.

  (Clark and Yallop 1995: 36)

  Spotlight: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

  First published in 1888, and revised several times since (most recently in 2005) in the light of new discoveries, the International Phonetic Alphabet provides a notational standard for the phonetic representation of all languages. The IPA uses symbols representing speech sounds, which are conventionally placed in square brackets. Unlike conventional written characters or graphemes, IPA symbols have a constant value, so while the letter g is pronounced differently in gap, gnaw and beige, the symbol [g ] always represents a voiced velar plosive, i.e. the sound in gap

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  eBook - ePub

  Experimental Phonetics

  An Introduction

  • Katrina Hayward(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)
• Spectral structure. For example, the nasal [n] and the lateral [l], which have some general characteristics in common, show differences in their spectra during the constriction interval. Outside the interval, for all Consonants the starting points and trajectories of the formant transitions (both preceding and following) play a major role as cues for place of articulation.
All three of the main acoustic dimensions just mentioned (presence vs. absence of aperiodic energy, timing, spectral structure) are necessary to define the impressionistic-phonetic categories of place of articulation, manner of articulation and voicing in acoustic terms.

7.2.3 Acoustic boundaries and Consonants

Another way of approaching the description of Consonants, at least when they occur before vowels, is to compare the spectrum of the interval sound with the spectrum of the onset of the following vowel. For example, to compare /ʃ/ with /ɑ/ in Figure 7.1 , we should note that the lower edge of the band of noise in /ʃ/ (just below 2000 Hz) is at roughly the same height at the onset of F3 for /ɑ/ The darkest part of the band (just below 3000 Hz) is between F3 and F4 .

The general hypothesis behind this approach is that the acoustic boundary between consonant and vowel is of particular importance for the listener. It is at acoustic boundaries that abrupt changes occur in the spectrum to which the auditory system may be particularly sensitive (Section 5.3.4 ). To quote Stevens (1985b: 253), ‘Either the acoustic correlates of phonetic features consist of specification of how the spectrum is changing in this region, or the region provides a landmark that indicates where nearby spectral or temporal information is to be sampled.’

I shall now give an overview of the acoustic characteristics of various types of Consonants, organised according to manner of articulation.

7.3 Stop Consonants

2

7.3.1 General characteristics of stop Consonants

During the production of stop Consonants, there is a complete closure somewhere in the vocal tract, cutting off the airstream from the lungs. The soft palate is raised, so that air cannot escape through the nasal cavity. If the vocal folds are not vibrating, no sound will be produced at all, resulting in a period of silence. On the other hand, during the closure period, air pressure is building up behind the closure. If a vowel immediately follows, release of the closure will be accompanied by a brief burst of noise, appropriately known as the burst