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.