Activity 1 Speech Apparatus, Phonetics and Phonology

Unit 1: Spech apparatus, Phonetics and Phonology

Samara Soto Catalan Cuarto Semestre Lic. Enseñanza y Aprendizaje del Ingles

Speech Apparatus

The Speech apparatus is the set of organs in the human body that are in charge of generating and amplifying the sound that is produced when we speak.

It's made up of 3 groups of organs:

1. Respiratory organs: (infraglottic cavities: lungs, bronchi and trachea)
2. Phonatory organs:(glottic cavities: larynx, vocal cords and resonators -nasal, buccal and pharyngeal-)
3. Articulatory organs: (supraglottic cavities: palate, tongue, teeth, lips and glottis)

How does it work?

• In order for it to produce sound, the air that comes from the lungs has to produce a vibration.
• The vocal cords are attached horizontally from the thyroid cartilage at the front to the arytenoid cartilages at the rear. By moving these cartilages as you speak, you alter the length and position of your vocal cords. When you start to say something, the arytenoid cartilages press the vocal cords against each other, thus closing the opening between them (known as the glottis).
• Under the pressure of the air being exhaled, the vocal cords separate, then close again immediately, causing the air pressure beneath the glottis to increase again. By opening and closing the glottis rapidly during phonation, the vocal cords release the air from the lungs in a vibrating stream. When you speak a sentence, you modify the vibration frequency of your vocal cords many times to produce the acoustic vibrations (sounds) that are the materials for the words.

Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Phonetics broadly deals with two aspects of human speech: production the ways humans make sounds and perception, the way speech is understood.

Modern phonetics has three main branches:

• Articulatory phonetics: which studies the way sounds are made with the articulators
• Acoustic phonetics: which studies the acoustic results of different articulations
• Auditory phonetics: which studies the way listeners perceive and understand linguistic signals.

Phonology:

• Phonology is the study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across languages.
• Phonology can be related to many linguistic disciplines, including psycholinguistics, cognitive science, sociolinguistics and language acquisition
• Principles of phonology can also be applied to treatments of speech pathologies and innovations in technology.
• In terms of speech recognition, systems can be designed to translate spoken data into text. One example of machines decoding language is the popular intelligence system, Siri.

PHONOLOGY

PHONETICS

• Phonetics simply describe the articulatory and acoustic properties of speech sound.
• Phonetics belong to descriptive linguistics.
• Studies the production, transmission , and reception of sound.
• Does not study one particular language

• Phonology studies how these sounds combine and how they change in combination, as well as which sound can contrast to procuce difference in meaning.
• Belongs to theoretical linguistics.
• studies different patterns of sounds in different languages.
• Can study one specific language.

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International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

• It's an alphabet developed in the 19th century to accurately represent the pronunciation of languages.
• The main ideas was to standardize the representation of spoken languages.
• The IPA primarly uses Roman Characters.
• Other letters are taken from different scripts (e.g. Greek) and where modified to conform the Roman style.
• It is used in some foreign language text books to transcribe the sound of languages.

IPA: How does it work?

The International Phonetic Alphabet is like any alphabet, except that, where most alphabets form the words of a language, the IPA represents the sounds of a language. Any language, in fact: the IPA can represent nearly any vowel or consonant made by humans.

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