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What is Phonetics?
Decoding the speech stream
Principles of phonetic transcription
IPA
Readings: 3.1-3.2

 The scientific study of human speech sounds
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How they are produced (articulatory)
How they are perceived (auditory)
Their physical properties (acoustic)

“Why did Ken set the soggy net
… on top of his deck ?” http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/chapter1.1/chapter1.1.htm

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The speech signal is a continuous stream of sound
No ‘spaces’ between words in speech

How many sounds in the following words?
‘leaf’ ‘feel’

‘leaf’ [lif] vs. ‘feel’ [fil] forwards
‘feel’ [fil] vs. ‘leaf’ [lif] backwards
‘lull’ vs. ‘llul’ backwards

 Sounds in a string are continuous, yet we perceive them as discrete, separate sounds

 Be able to identify human speech sounds
 Learn symbols used for transcribing speech sounds
 Describe and classify sounds according to articulatory properties

 The most widely used tool in phonetics is transcription

 A standardized set of symbols for transcribing all possible human speech sounds
 One-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound
We will use “symbol” = IPA
“letter” = spelling (orthography)

Interactive IPA chart can be found at: http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/c hapter1/chapter1.html

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Some languages have no writing system
There is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds:
 Same letter — different sounds
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 dad, father, about, many
Same sound — different letters believe, people, amoeba, tree
Several letters used for one sound shoot, nation, chord, chip

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One letter used for several sounds box, use
Some letters have no sound gnaw, sword, debt, damn, bomb
[ba ks ] [ ju z]
[ nç ]...[ba m ]

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Some symbols will look and sound familiar:
[b n w]
Some will look familiar, but sound strange:
[x q]
Some will sound familiar, but look strange:
[S T N]
Some will look and sound unfamiliar:
[ / µ ß]

[p] spit, tip, appear
[b] ball, globe, amble
[t] stack, pat, stuffed, pterodactyl
_x0008_ Hints:
-Pay attention to how you
SAY it; not how it’s spelled.
[d] dip, card, drop, loved
[k] skit, joker, attic, exceed
-check your pronunciation against a native speaker’s.
[g] guard, bag, longer
[/] uh-oh (the “catch” in your throat preceding both syllables), mitten
[f] foot, laugh, philosophy, coffee
[v] vest, dove, gravel
[T] through, bath, thistle, ether, teeth
[D] the, their, mother, either, teethe

[s] soap, psychology, nice
[z] zip, roads, kisses, xerox, design
[S] shy, mission, nation, glacial, sure
[Z] measure, vision, azure, casualty
[h] who, hat, reheat
[tS] choke, match, church
[dZ] judge, george, jelly, region, residual
[m] moose, lamb, smack
[n] nap, snow, can, know
[N] lung, thing, think, finger, singer, ankle

[l] leaf, feel, mild, sleep
[r]*reef, fear, prune, carry
[R] writer, rider, latter, ladder, pretty
[w]with, swim, mowing, queen, twin
[j] you, beautiful, feud, use, yell
* In the IPA, [r] is actually a trill like in Spanish
“perro”. The IPA symbol for American ‘r’ is [ ®] , but you can use either symbol since the text uses [r] for American ‘r’.