Katie Welch, PhD
LING 3311, Section 001
University of Texas at Arlington
 Phonetics
is the study of _________________
 What is the IPA? Why is it needed?
 What is meant by pulmonic egressive
airstream mechanism?
 Consonants are described by what three
characteristics? In what order?
 What is the difference between a vowel and
a consonant?
 What is the difference between a fricative
and an affricate?
 What change occurs in the vocal tract to
produce a nasal sound?
Reminder
Articulation
Humans are fallible. Therefore, our assessments of
articulation are only approximations. We must
employ more precise, scientific methods to verify
that our intuitions are correct.
 Consonants:



Palatography=picture of where the tongue
touches the roof of the mouth
Static Palatography (black dye)
Dynamic Palatography (electropalatography)
 Vowel



Place and Manner of Articulation
Articulation
X-ray (not used as much because of safety reasons)
MRI= Magnetic Resonance Imaging
EMA=Electromagnetic Articulography
Study Holds Promise for Patients Silenced by Stroke
Callier Center Researcher Using Rare Machine to Track Speech Movements
March 3, 2008
To say the word “slant,” the tongue must touch a bit behind the teeth. For the word
“boot,” the mouth must be pursed.
Although automatic to most people, speech is a complex process of tongue, mouth and jaw,
a combination of body parts known as the articulatory organs, which, because they are
inside the mouth, are difficult to observe in action.
“In the past scientists used candle soot to mark the placement of these organs in making
words,” said Dr. William F. Katz, a professor of communications disorders at the UT Dallas
Callier Center, in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Today Katz is using an Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA) to see inside patients’ mouths
to track their speech movements. The EMA is a machine so rare that there are only about 40
in the world, but it holds out promise as a therapy tool for people who have lost the ability
to speak. The Callier Center has two of these advanced machines. With a three-year grant
from the Department of Veterans Affairs, Katz is using the machine to treat stroke victims.
Wearing a halo apparatus over their heads, the patients sit in front of computer screens.
Small sensors attached to thin wires are placed inside their mouths. As they struggle to
form words, magnified images of their mouth movements appear on the screen before
them. The EMA machine helps patients with motor learning by showing them how to
position their tongues to create speech sounds – a process that Katz calls “physical therapy
for speech.”
Most of the people Katz sees at the Callier Center suffer from Apraxia of Speech (AOS). This
disorder is marked by an inability to perform voluntary movements of the articulatory
organs, which are necessary to produce spoken language. So even though they understand
language, some stroke survivors may not be able to produce any words at all or may say the
wrong words instead.
However, the EMA is not a magic bullet and is very expensive, costing $50,000 to $80,000.
“It takes a lot of time to fix broken speech, but this machine is giving us an important new
tool,” said Katz. “The VA has a long history of funding cutting-edge research, and we could
not do the work we are doing without its support.”
Articulation
Think of your native language and/or other
languages that you speak besides English.
 What vowel sounds does your language have
that English does not have?
 Can you find them on the IPA chart on the
back cover of the book?
 Do you speak a language that has nasalized
vowels?
Length, Intonation, Tone, Stress
Individual sounds
 Includes tongue
height and
advancement,
manner and place of
articulation, lip
rounding, etc.
 Can be identified by
viewing a single
segment

Segments
Supra- means ‘over’
or ‘above’
 These are things that
“ride on top of”
individual sounds
 Include length,
intonation, tone, and
stress
 Almost impossible to
identify in single
segment

Suprasegments
 Some
speech sounds are longer than others
 A relative variation
 In some languages, differences in length are
meaningful
 Finnish example (p. 64)
 Inherent differences in sounds (voiceless
consonants longer than voiced consonants)
 Surrounding sounds can influence
(beat vs. bead)
 Pattern
of pitch movements across a stretch
of speech (such as a sentence)
 Intonation can affect meaning.


You got an A on the test
What a beautiful cake
 Pitch
Accent: A change in frequency in the
middle of an utterance

Example 3 on p. 65
 Edge
Tone: change in frequency at the end of
a phrase

Example 4 on p. 66
 Meaning
affected by the pitch at which the
syllables in a word are pronounced
 [ma] in Mandarin Chinese
 Many ways to transcribe tones



Numbers (55, 35, 214)
Accent marks over the syllables
Low-high-low, low-low-high
 Tone
is relative, not absolute
 A language can have both tone and
intonation
A property of syllables
 A stressed syllable is more prominent than an
unstressed one, due to having greater loudness,
longer duration, different pitch, or full vowels
 Photograph vs. photography (changes from full
vowel to schwa)
 Some languages predictable for the placement of
stress; others must be memorized
 For those where placement is not predictable, a
change in stress can result in a change in
meaning (ex. incite, insight)
