Exploring Vowel Possibilities: A Comprehensive Overview
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Presentation Transcript
Lecture A6 English Phonetics and Phonology
Vowel possibilities! • In this lecture we will learn… • Vowel possibilities • Use this information to compare to consonant possibilities (A5)
With consonants… • With consonants… distinct articulation of speech organs
With vowels… • This is less clear… and complex in different ways. • For articulation… all vowels are approximants
approximants… • All we can do is distinguish broadly if they the… • Front • Centre or • Back of tongue raised towards top of mouth
Voicing? Energy? • With vowels… voicing and energy don’t really help us understand how to make vowel sounds. • Vowels are typically voiced… so can’t really contrast voiced/unvoiced… fortis/lenis
So how… (can we understand????] • Acoustic information • But acoustic information takes a long time to study and requires lengthy scientific detail. • So how can we actually apply this to us?
Physical variables • Combination of articulatory and auditory criteria
So far… • Open and close • Front and back
Considering limits • We call this the vowel area. You will see three possible ways to draw the vowel area.
Lip Shape • Changing the shape of your lips will change the quality of vowel sounds. • Lip rounding… • 1) opens up space inside the mouth • 2) or closes up space inside the mouth • Try it!
In other words… • Duration, like other parts of language study, should NOT be done in isolation. • Sentence stress > word stress • Reading books > memorizing list of vocab • Long listening exercise (like TOEFL) > short listening (like TOEIC) • Relationship of length in vowel sounds > length in vowel sounds alone