This is class 9 in a semester-long Phonetics course for students of Communication Disorders.

1. Phonetics ~ Class 9
CD 233
Lavoie

2. Today’s goals
Review articulation of vowels and
consonants
Understand phonemes and allophones
Experiment with Palatography

3. For yourself before we start
Write down:
Descriptors of vowels
Descriptors of consonants
Draw mid-sagittal sections of m and g

4. Review vowel articulation
What are the dimensions we use to
describe vowels?
Where do the English vowels fall along
those dimensions?

5. Review consonant articulation
Descriptors of a consonant
Manner
 Stop, Fricative, Affricate, Liquid, Glide
Place
 Bilabial, labiodental, interdental, alveolar,
palatal, velar, glottal
Voicing (voiced or voiceless)
Nasality (nasal or oral)

6. Experiment with place
Run tongue tip from between teeth to as
far back as you can go
Now make a sequence of p, f, th, s, t,
sh, ch, k, glottal stop
How far apart are each of these places?

7. Interpreting sagittal sections
The “small articulation heads”
What sound is being articulated?
Voicing (look at glottis)
Nasality (look at position of velum)
Place (look at where articulators approach)
Manner (look at how close the articulators
are)

8. Limitations of mid-sagittal plane
Mid-sagittal does not show pattern of
tongue contact on palate
Palatography (static, dynamic) shows:
Tongue to palate (linguopalatal) contact
Palate to tongue (palatolingual) contact

9. palatography

10. Palatography
What pattern does our tongue make on
our hard palate when articulating a
sound?
See additional handouts

11. Palatography yields …
Palatogram Linguagram

12. Capturing palate images

13. Static palatography
The charcoal method works for a single sound
Imagine and draw the contact pattern of the
tongue on the palate when you are sipping
from a straw
Now imagine and sketch t, d; s, sh, z, zh, l
References if needed:
 http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/facilities/physiology/stati
c_pal_new/webpal.htm
 http://www2.hawaii.edu/~vanderso/LDC.pdf

15. Dynamic palatography
You really want to know the pattern of contact
over time!
But the charcoal method would just make a big
black mess and obscure individual contact
That’s where EPG – electropalatography –
comes in
Uses a pseudopalate (like a retainer)

16. /t/ /k/

17. Pseudopalate and digital display

18. Clinical uses (Michi et al 1986)
Dynamic palatography generates visual
display of constantly changing tongue to
palate contact over time, using an
artificial palate plate covered with
electrodes
The display of contact helps clinician
guide client’s sound formation

19. Pamela’s /s/ (groove width)
Pre-treatment Post-treatment

20. Pamela’s /r/ (symmetry)
Pre-treatment Post-treatment

21. Flying 3D palates
 From the UCLA Phonetics Lab (section III)
 We can look at change of contact during phrases
 http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/facilities/physiolo
gy/epg.html

22. Phonemes and allophones

23. Allophone cartoon

24. /Phonemes/ and [allophones]
The single hardest concept in phonetics
and phonology!
/Phoneme/: basic mental unit
[Allophone]: actual realization of that unit
in a particular context or conditioning
environment
Complementary distribution

25. Non-speech phoneme/allophones
Serving carrots
Appropriate preparation for each course
Handwriting, esp. cursive
How letters look in particular positions

26. More metaphors for allophones
/Shirt/ – choose for context
[Formal shirt with collar]
[Warm cozy hand-knit sweater]
[Red t-shirt with rude saying]
[No shirt at all – omission]
/Water/ – temperature is context
[Liquid] ~ [Ice] ~ [Steam]

27. Allophones of vowels
Co-articulation, efficient planning yield
overlap of articulations
English has oral vowel phonemes
But when an oral vowel occurs before a
nasal consonant, it becomes nasalized

28. French nasal vowel phonemes
French vowels are contrastively oral or nasal
So the oral or nasal vowels give you a
difference in meaning
 http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter14/fr
ench2.html
In English a nasalized vowel doesn’t give a
difference in meaning

29. Free variation
Acceptable variation between realizations of a
sound in same position
Two or more sounds in same environment,
without a change in meaning and without
being considered incorrect by native speakers
Examples:
 Released or unreleased stops at ends of words
 /t/ realized as glottal stop or as [t]
As opposed to “complementary distribution”

30. Allophones of consonants
 Light and dark /l/
 Lee vs. eel
 Onset vs. coda position
 Fronted /k/
 “coo” vs. key”
 Front/back position of following vowel
 Dental /n/
 Nine vs. ninth
 Preceding a dental consonant

31. Poster child for allophones: /t/
Many realizations of /t/
Some depend on environment
 “top” “stop” “butter” “kitten” “hunter”
 “get your”
Some depend on attitude :)
 “get out”
Listen for these

32. Voicing and
voice onset time (VOT)

33. VOT – Voice Onset Time
How voicing and aspiration contrasts are
actually articulated
To understand this, we need the concept
of articulatory gestures
Hearing voiced, voiceless, aspirated
depends on relative timing of glottal
gesture with respect to stop release

34. Articulatory gestures
 Have a duration and a magnitude
 Can be reduced or increased or overlapped
 Some misalignment is perfectly natural
 Different articulators have different precision
 “Sluggish” velum vs. very nimble tongue tip
 Other misalignment may be disordered
 http://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/CV_or
ganization/Gestural_Scores/index.html

36. Basics of plosives and VOT
www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/project/siphtra.htm
Under Web Tutorials
Plosives (Basics)
Plosives (VOT and Aspiration)

37. 2-way VOT contrast
English
Languages can choose different cut off
points to make their VOT contrasts
English contrasts an aspirated stop
[voiceless] with a voiceless unaspirated
stop [voiced], so it’s just a two-way
contrast

38. 3-way VOT contrast
Thai
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapt
er6/thai/thai.html
Thai has phonemes of /p/, /ph/ and /b/
Thai contrasts an aspirated stop with a
voiceless unaspirated with a voiced

39. 4-way VOT contrast
Hindi
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/lin
guistics/VowelsandConsonants/index/soun
ds.html
Voiceless, voiceless aspirated
Voiced, AND voiced aspirated
 Hindi has phonemes of /p/, /ph/, /b/, and /bh/

40. Summary of VOT contrasts
 English has phonemes of /p/ and /b/
 Thai has phonemes of /p/, /ph/ and /b/
 Hindi has phonemes of /p/, /ph/, /b/, and /bh/
 Languages can and do cut up the phonemes and allophones
differently
 Another piece of evidence that minimal pairs are crucial to show
what’s contrastive in a language