Articulatory Phonetics

Hi! It’s Ana, and I’m going to talk about the source: The Articulatory Phonetics.

The Articulatory Phonetics concerns the production of the speech sounds. It is a process in which a linguistic message, thought previously by the speaker, is perceived by the human auditory system as sound.

When two people are talking to each other, a great deal of activity of many different kinds is going on in both of them. The most vital part of this is taking place in their brains because this is where they have stored away all the knowledge about the language they are using.

The whole time anyone is speaking, his brain is busy putting into language form whatever he wants to say, that it is choosing words and putting them in the appropriate order, inserting the grammatical elements and form words. In addition to this, his brain is sending out a continuous flow of operating instructions which go to many different muscles involved in making the skilled movements of speech. These instructions go in the shape of nerve impulses to the breathing muscles in the chest and trunk, the muscles of the larynx which take part in the articulation of speech sounds.

The resulting movements of the various parts of the speech mechanism generate the sound waves of speech which flow out in all directions from the speaker, through the vocal tract, to the ears of the listener as acoustic energy.

The vocal tract includes three main components:

1.     air cavities

2.     pistons

3.     air valves

The main air cavities present in the articulatory system are the supraglottal cavity and the subglottal cavity. They are so-named because the glottis, the openable space between the vocal folds internal to the larynx, separates the two cavities. The supraglottal cavity or the orinasal cavity is divided into an oral subcavity and a nasal subcavity. The subglottal cavity consists of the trachea and the lungs.

Pistons are initiators. They are used to initiate a change in the volumes of air cavities, and are the corresponding air pressure of the cavity. The three pistons present in the articulatory system are the larynx, the tongue body, and the physiological structures used to manipulate lung volume. The lung pistons are used to initiate a pulmonic airstream. The larynx is used to initiate the glottalic airstream mechanism by changing the volume of the supraglottal and subglottal cavities via vertical movement of the larynx.

Valves regulate airflow between cavities. Airflow occurs when an air valve is open and there is a pressure difference between in the connecting cavities. When an air valve is closed, there is no airflow. The air valves are the vocal folds (the glottis, the velopharyngeal port, the tongue and the lips. Like the pistons, the air valves are also controlled by various muscles.

To produce any kind of sound, there must be movement of air. The movement of air must pass through the vocal chords, up through the throat and, into the mouth or nose to then leave the body.

In the next post Laura is going to introduce us to the next branches of Phonetics. 

Introduction

Welcome to our first post!!!

I’m María and this is going to be an introduction to phonetics.

First of all, it’s very important to find a definition for our object of study. So… what is phonetics? Well, phonetics is the study of human speech sounds and is divided in three branches: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics and auditory phonetics. To understand well these branches we have to look at the communication scheme:

 In the first step (the source) we find articulatory phonetics, because this branch studies how speech sounds are produced. In the second step (the channel) we find acoustics phonetics, which studies sound waves. And finally, in the last step (the receiver) we find auditory phonetics, which studies how speech sounds are perceived. Easy, isn't it?

Phonetics is therefore interdisciplinary, because to study all these aspects of human speech is necessary to be closely related to disciplines as physiology or acoustics for example.

There are also numerous areas in which phonetic provides its contents, as in speech therapy (a medical specialty that deals with problems related to voice) or in forensic phonetics (the use of phonetic knowledge in criminal cases).

 The object of study of phonetics is the spoken language, but our image of the language is based on writing, although we know that the spoken language is prior to writing (in history and in the development of a child). You have to study in detail the relationship between spelling and sound because a letter can be related with two or more sounds and a sound can be related with two or more letters. To solve this problem we use phonetics alphabets as IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).

In the next post we are going to see in detail the first branch of phonetics with Ana.

I hope you find this useful. J