Lecture 1 phonetics

1. Phonetics and communication

2. Articulation: how sounds are made and classified

1. Consonants

2. Consonants in context

3. Vowels

4. Vowels in context

3. Language acquisition: how speech sounds are learned

4. Acoustics: how sounds are processed and described

1.1. Phonetics and communication

Phonetics is concerned with the study of speech in human communication. The aim of the present course is to provide explanation of how speech is produced, perceived and acquired, and how on-line phenomena of speaking, listening and learning the language are related to the sound patterns of English, the target language, and Russian, the mother tongue.

Speech production is studied by articulatory phonetics; speech perception is the object of auditory phonetics; speech signal measurements are taken by various techniques in acoustic phonetics.

Any speech event is a complex process controlled by the brain. However we can present it as a simple one-way process of one person speaking (production) which is followed by sound waves travelling in the air (transmission) and the other person receiving them (perception). The role of the speaker's brain is to encode and the receiver's brain to decode the message thus transmitted.

Not only does the brain send out the commands necessary for producing speech, but it also constantly receives feedback in the form of speech sounds produced at the moment; if we were not able to monitor our speaking process in this way, we would find it extremely difficult to speak at all.

To understand the process of two people speaking we need to make use of information from physiology, acoustics, cognitive psychology and, of course, linguistics.

Figure 1 illustrates the chain of events starting from the cognitive /linguistic level, to physiological, t₀ acoustical, then again to physiological and cognitive/linguistic. We can describe the speech sounds at any stage in this chain: the physical properties of the sounds may be measured and described acoustically, the way listeners perceive them is revealed through auditory experiments but our primary concern as language learners will be with the way speech sounds are produced, i.e. with articulation, or speech production.

In fact, the success of communication act depends on the operation of all the systems involved but production-perception coordination is really decisive in intercultural communication. Communication depends upon mutual intelligibility. This is only possible if language forms (sounds, words, utterances) produced by the speaker are identified and understood by the listener. Communication failures, or intercultural misunderstandings, to put it mildly, may depend on a range of phonetic features: consonant and vowel pronunciations, word stress misplacement, change of rhythm type, intonation patterns. These are the cases from my own experience:

(a) consonants

At the railway ticket office in Tokyo the Japanese officer asked us in English if we would like to have ['пэи 'li:zav] tickets. We didn't understand the specification but agreed to it. When the train started we had to move on with our luggage through a dozen cars to where passengers with "no reserve" tickets were seated (two of which were smoking compartments!). The inconvenience was caused by the fact that in Japanese the sounds /r/ and /1/ are not discriminated.

(b) vowels

A Russian colleague was entertaining an American guest in her home and cooked a meal of veal heart with vegetables. When she said [ha:t] the American guest said he really liked his food [hat] meaning hot. (It was a good thing the meal was warm enough!) In the American pronunciation the short back vowel /t>/ is reflected as /a/ vowel.

(c) word stress placement

In Scotland the British guide talking Russian promised the tourists they would see Scottish [Valenki]. It turned out later on that she meant [va'lmki], the Scottish pipes. That was a surprise and a bit of disappointment.

(d) rhythm (based on accent patterns)

At the airport in Barcelona the Spanish officer announcing the flight to Moscow kept calling out something like a Russian family name. However the first syllables were quite obscure because of the fast machine-gun rhythm, with only the last syllable accented: [— 'zov!]. People looked worried but no one moved. After slowing down a little the speaker made it possible to understand that the call was in Russian: Пос-лед-ний- вы-'зов! (Last calif) In Spanish and in French there is only one accent at the end of the tone unit which makes it one-accent group. It is very difficult to make out separate words, especially for English and Russian speakers, who expect to have a number of accents in the intonation group. To the English and Russian ear the accentual patterns of words sound distorted and the important points are not taken except for the very last word.

(e) intonation

Intonation evokes more subtle, culture-bound attitudes when transferred from one language to the other. The conventional intonation pattern of Russian direct address, when used in the English setting, sounds like a peremptory command, which is rather rude:

'Annie/(with a high fall). 'Give it to me, please!

On the other hand, the American English direct address which was meant to be friendly sounded implicatory to a Russian ear, like a warning:

/innie (with a low rise).

There are similar cases of thanks misinterpreted by foreigners: British English thanks pronounced by men sounded curt and lacking enthusiasm which in case of generous gift-giving was very impolite: —, Thanks (with a low fall). The British, in their turn, comment on the Russian profuse thanks which they find very embarrassing (as if the Russians didn't expect to be given the favour!). As a result, there was a failure to create empathy by a friendly gesture of gift-giving though neither party actually meant to sound ungrateful.

It is understandable now why we have to follow the requirements of Council of Europe directions in speaking English:

• as listeners, to identify words and expressions used by native speakers of the (regionally coloured) standard variants of English (RP, Polite Scottish, Irish, General American and Australian) and by non-native speakers whose speech, though also regionally coloured, approximates to those norms;

• as speakers, to produce spoken English which is readily intelligible both to native speakers and non-native speakers who approximate to stan­dard norms.

A note is made that regional variants differ mainly in vowel colouring whereas the consonant system which has been shown to play the larger role in identifying words is relatively uniform and stable.

Thus to be aware of and to be able to preserve in our own speech the vowel and, particularly, consonant contrasts, as well as placement of stress in polysyllabic words, and the principal contrasts carried by accent and intonation are the necessary conditions for communication to be successful in the international context. When we say "contrasts", we mean that a change in sounds creates a change in meaning.

Phonetics is, therefore, primarily concerned with speech production (how sounds are made by speakers), speech perception (how sounds are perceived by listeners) and speech analysis (how sound waves can be processed and described).

The description of specific sounds and systems of sounds as well as rules of combining them into syllables, words and phrases used by language for human communication constitutes the link between phonetics and phonology.

Phonology, which is sometimes called linguistic phonetics, is concerned with a sound system as a system of contrastive units, phonemes, and their distinctive features.

Phonetics takes care of the physical properties of sounds, while phonology focuses on their functional characteristics: it selects only those features which are distinctive for contrasting sounds (and, therefore, words) in a particular language.