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SPEECH ARTICULATION 3 . Diphthongs

SPEECH ARTICULATION 3 . Diphthongs. David Brett. While the position of the tongue is more or less stable for a pure vowel…. … a diphthong is characterised by a graceful movement from one point to another, for this reason they are also sometimes known as glides.

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SPEECH ARTICULATION 3 . Diphthongs

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  1. SPEECH ARTICULATION 3. Diphthongs David Brett

  2. While the position of the tongue is more or less stable for a pure vowel…

  3. … a diphthong is characterised by a graceful movement from one point to another, for this reason they are also sometimes known as glides.

  4. This is also visible on a spectrogram: this is the pure vowel /a/…

  5. …and this is the diphthong /aI/. Notice how the formants (the dark bands) seperate towards the end.

  6. English diphthongs may cause Italian speakers difficulty for two main reasons: • Italian has four diphthongs (I think!) while English has eight. All the Italian diphthongs have equivalents in English which are not the same but which are reasonably similar • Nowhere is the English spelling system more bizarre than in its representation of diphthongs

  7. If one has a clear idea of where pure vowels are articulated on the quadrilateral then interpreting the diphthong symbols is not difficult.

  8. Technically, English diphthongs are divided into two groups: • Closing diphthongs – which tend to move from an open to a close position, these roughly correspond to Italian sounds • Centring diphthongs – which tend towards a central position ( / @/ )

  9. First we will look at the closing group…

  10. … the ‘pay’, ‘ made’, ‘maid’, ‘reign’, ‘obey’, sound:

  11. Then we have the ‘I’, ‘my’, ‘tie’, ‘sigh’, ‘either’, ‘eye’, ‘Thai’, sound:

  12. Then there is ‘boy’, ‘choice’:

  13. Then ‘down’, ‘loud’:

  14. To end the closing group, the most common diphthong in English, that of ‘no’, ‘know’,‘bone’, ‘foam’, ‘sew’, ‘though’, ‘don’t’, ‘foe’, ‘crow’:

  15. To start with the centring group, we have the most common, that of ‘clear’, ‘deer’, ‘here’, ‘wier’:

  16. Then ‘air’, ‘where’, wear’, ‘care’, ‘heir’:

  17. Finally, there is a diphthong which is quite rare and is often realised as /O:/ - ‘tour’, ‘poor’:

  18. Similar to pure vowels, the acoustic qualities (formants 1 and 2) of diphthongs may be plotted on a graph similar to the quadrilateral…

  19. … this is an elaborated plot of inverted values of F1 against F2 of the diphthong /aI/.

  20. One or two final considerations: • Although the symbols indicating pure vowels and the starting and closing points of diphthongs are often the same they do not necessarily correspond to the same points • Lip rounding is another variable, generally associated with back vowels

  21. Finally: • Diphthongs are the element in a language which are most liable to change. The majority of the characteristics of a given accent are usually to be found in this area, so understanding of the underlying mechanics is vital if one wants to understand accents and accent change.

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