I.4 Some phonetic phenomena common for both languages:

Lateral Plosion: English: pure plosives /p, t, k, b, d, as well as Russian plosives /п, п’, т, т’, к, к’, б, б’, д, д’, г, г’/ coming into contact with a lateral oral sonant / l / and consequently / л / or /л’/, form the clusters in which a preceding consonant loses its plosive character, the air goes at the sides of the tongue producing turbulence, the oral sonant is slightly devoiced under the influence of voiceless consonants, for example: battle/'b^×^paddle/'d^×l/, тля/т^×л’а/.

Nasal Plosion: When pure English or Russian plosives form clusters

with nasal sonants, for example /m, n /, and consequently /м, м’,н, н’/, the preceding consonant loses its plosion and the air goes with a slight plosion through a nasal cavity: E: sudden /^'sd^×n/, mitten /'m^×n/ and consequently R: дно /д^×но/, /сот^xн^’а/.

I.5 The articulators and principal resonators of the speech mechanism.

The usefulness of a detailed study of the anatomy, physiology,

and acoustics of speech and hearing is obvious to any serious student.

Some simple diagrams of our sound - producing mechanism appear

below.

Figure 6: The vibrating source:

(Top) Vocal cords at rest. (Bottom) Vocal cords vibrating.

Figure 8: Active and passive organs of speech.

I.6 Phoneme and allophone.

Phoneme is a minimal linguistic unit which can’t be divided linearly into smaller units and is potentially connected with meaning. It is manifested in speech by its allophones. According to the principles of speech division and the methods of establishing the phonemic structure of English, elaborated by the scholars of St.Petersburg Phonological School, we can distinguish among 44(if triphthongs are not included) or 49(if triphthongs are included) phonemes in English.

They are: consonants: / /, / b /, / /,/ /, / /, / /, / /, / /, /  /, / /, / /, / /,/  /, / /,/ /, / /,/ /, / /, / /, / /, / /, / /, / /, //; vowels: / ί /, / /, / /, / /,/ /, /  /, /  /, / /, / /, / /, //, / /, / /, /  /, /  /, / / /, //,/  /, /e/,.//, //, //,/  /; - a dying diphthong /  /, for example, core / /, door /  /.

If we take the examples “tea”, “tip”, “light”, “storm”, “eighth” and analyse the []-es in all these words we'll clearly see that all these speech sounds are perceptually different segments. [¹] in "tea" is strongly aspirated. [²] in “tip” is aspirated in a lesser degree, [ ³ ] in "light" is weakly aspirated, [ t^× ] in "stop" and ''storm" is of zero aspiration, [ ^ώ] in “eighth” becomes dental. It is so because [ ¹ ] only occurs before stressed tense vowels, [ ² ] occurs before stressed lax vowels, [³] occurs in a final position of a word or before unstressed vowels, [t^×] occurs when it follows / s /, and [^ώ] occurs before [] and [ ]. It is known that when sounds, which are clearly different, never occur in the same environment, they are in the relations of complementary distribution. All these sounds are the realizations or the allophones of one functional unit - the phoneme /  /.