Text Materials:

• Ladefoged 5th Edition, Chapts 1-7 (and handouts).
• American English allophones webpage
• Dynamics of Speech handout
  
• ToBi materials

Midterm Exam on Friday:  Mostly objective questions (fill-ins, short answer), some diagram labelling, a `dynamics of speech' diagram or two.  Probably a Tobi phrase or two and a short transcription. (So bring your headphones)

Transcription:  Be able to transcribe dialects of English using the basic IPA alphabet.  Recognize implosives, ejectives, clicks (labial, lateral and palatal when voiced, voiceless, aspirated and nasal).

Speech anatomy: lips, tongue tip (apex), tongue blade, tongue dorsum, tongue root.  Mouth, nasal cavity, pharynx (nasal and oral), soft palate (velum), hard palate, alveolar ridge.
       Larynx vs. glottis (larynx is cartilage and muscle, the glottis is a space), vocal folds, false vocal folds, trachea, epiglottis.

Basic symbol set of the IPA (International Phonetic Assoc.) alphabet.

Places of Articulation (for consonants) - at two `levels of detail': Labial, Apical, Palatal, Velar, Glottal, OR bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, retroflex, palato-alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, labiovelar, glottal (Ladef, Table on p. 167)

Manners of Articulation (for consonants) (Chapters 3, 7, see `Manner' Table on p. 176): stop, nasal, approximant, fricative, trill, tap, flap, lateral vs. central.  What argument could you raise to claim that the click property is a Manner of Artic? (because they occur at different places, eg, labial, dental, palatal, etc)  What argument could you raise to claim that the click property is a Place of Artic? (because they come in different manners, like nasal, +/- voice, ejective, lateral, etc).

    But the Place x Manner x Voicing model of phonetics is inadequate because:

1) `secondary articulations'?, clicks? (This scheme does not allow enough independent dimensions)
2) empty cells: eg, `lateral velars, velar flaps'? (The dimensions of Place and Manner are often not independent)
3) No place for timing patterns like VOT or C length. (`Nonsegment-like properties' are ignored)

Vowels

Vowel dimensions: tongue height, tongue backness, lip rounding.  For English, how many V dimensions? Only 2? (maybe just height and backness) Or 3? (height, backness, rounding)  Or more? (height, backness, rounding,  length, etc).
Monophthongs vs diphthongs.  Which Vs in English are ambiguous on this property?
`Secondary vowel articulations': nasalization, rhoticism (or retroflexion)
Stressed, unstressed; reduced vowels, full vowel; pitch accent.
Tense Vs, lax Vs; closed vs. open syllables (Which Eng Vs only occur in closed syllables? Which contrasts are usually neutralized before /r/?
        Which English Vs are the longest in duration and which the shortest?)

Consonants

Stops, fricatives (obstruents); Essential gestures: oral closure + nasal closure OR glottal closure
Apical stop variants: lateral release (bottle), glottal stop (cotton), flap (or tap) (butter), trill, velar release (sudden)
Homorganic relationships, voicing pairs. What is coarticulation?
Air stream mechanisms: (pulmonic, glottalic, velaric) X (ingressive, egressive).  Match these with `plosive, ejective, implosive, click.'
Voice-onset time: Continuous-valued, in fact, but across languages has 3 modes: prevoiced, short-lag (unaspirated), long-lag (aspirated).
        Cf. Eng vs. French VOT patterns.
Other `voicing' cues for English: vowel duration and obstruent duration for postvocalic obstruents.

Affricates vs. fricatives (note spelling!)
Breathy-voiced stops (voiced aspirates) (eg, in what languages?)
Glottal articulations:  [h] vs. voiceless vs. voiced (laryngealized voice, glottal fry, breathy voice, etc.)
Be familiar with the major English `allophonic variants' of vowels and consonants (pp. 71-76).

Port's `Continuous-Time English Speech Production Model'

Based on a set of `independent articulatory systems': Lips, Tongue-tip, Tongue-body, Velum, Vocal-folds. Each of these dimensions (or systems) is largely independent of the others, and has a limited set of mutually exclusive values.  (Eg, the lips can be open, rounded or closed, but can never be in two states at once.) Each system changes state in continuous time in one dimension (eg, lip rounding) or two (eg, tongue body position).  Plots of each articulatory system (reducing each to a single dimension) can be plotted against time (somewhat like a musical score). Be able to draw such plots for any single words showing coarticulation, assimilation and certain prominent timing details.

Properties of the IPA phonetic alphabet

• IPA attempts to be universal, but is really (according to Port) only more consistent than orthography (that is, than conventional spelling)
• Good for writing down approximate actual pronunciations (if you were trained to use an alphabet) but not exact ones.
• May be a better model for cognitive form of words than orthography, but is not necessarily an adequate model.
• It's feasible to cover most of the sounds of languages of the world, but impossible to get all of them (claims Port) because there is no reason to believe there is a fixed inventory. (Ie, languages can keep inventing new sounds, just like new tunes on a fiddle.)
  
• The closer we look, the more subtle features we find that differ between languages (The phonetic space cannot be closed but rather must be open-ended) (Phoneticians would generally agree with this but not most linguists.)
  

• People seem to have awareness of gross sound categories, like phonemes, but not to be aware of phonetic details. (This is probably because of literacy training.) Though some details are easier to hear than others.  Eg, its easy to hear stop [t] vs. flap, or longer V in bad than bat. But its hard to hear /k/ longer than /g/ in backer-bagger.  Speakers of  language A will often find some sounds in language B very difficult to impossible to differentiate or identify - thus there are NO perfect transcribers.
  
• Phonemes: hypothesized abstract, cognitive sound units that strongly resemble the letters of an alphabet. Units like these are thought to ``spell'' words in human memory. They are nonoverlapping, serially ordered, always either identical or distinct.  And each word supposedly has a single citation-form spelling.   (But I think these are really properties of our alphabetical notation.  These are obviously not properties of speech sound. Linguists (and many phoneticians) prefer to ignore this fact.)
  
• Prosody: Languages have conventional patterns of pitch, loudness and timing at the level of words and phrases. But these are typically difficult to describe for most languages - given current knowledge. One problem is that they cannot be reduced (very well) to letters - though ToBI tries to approximate this.
  
• Allophonic rules sometimes cause `alternations' in certain words (eg, Ladef, p. 39).  By speaking of allophones, we are able to spell vocabulary using a smaller (and supposedly more efficient) set of symbols.  (Do speaker-hearers store words in this `efficient form?  Almost certainly not - says Port.)   Some allophonic rules are language specific (eg, Eng  nonaspiration of /t/ after /s/ in store), some nearly universal (eg, nasalization of V/_N, undershooting a low vowel between high vowels, eg, in yaya vs. baba - lower [a] in baba). Be familiar with the major English allophonic rules in Ladefoged pp 71-76. Be able to interpret the rule notation used by Ladefoged.
• Systematic phonetic transcription vs. Impressionistic phonetic transcription.  Assumes a phonological analysis. Systematic implies using the allophonic rules in the transcription, Impressionistic implies just listening and recording what you actually hear.
  
• Feature analysis of phonemes: know the main phonetic features of the consonant phonemes of English (although not the binary ones used by phonologists).