Chapter Two
Speech Sounds
I. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word, the first letter of which is
already given as a clue.
1. P______ studies how speech sounds are produced, transmitted and perceived.
2. P______ is the study of the sound patterns and sound systems of languages.
3. C______ are sound segments produced by a closure in the vocal tract, or by a
narrowing which is so marked that air can not escape without producing audible
friction.
4.In the production of consonants, m______ of articulation refers to the actual
relationship between the articulators and thus the way in which the air passes through
certain parts of the vocal tract.
5.C______ is a kind of phonetic process in which simultaneous or overlapping
articulations are involved.
6. R______ pronunciation (RP), many people also call it BBC English ,Oxford
English, or King’s/Queen’s English.
7. In the USA, the widely accepted accent used by most educated speakers is often
referred to as G______ American(GA).
8. P ______ simply refers to a unit of explicit sound contrast, the
existence of a minimal pair automatically grants phonemic status to the sounds
responsible for the contrasts.
9. The use of a simple set of symbols in transcription is called b ______ transcription.
10. Nasalization, dentalization and velarization are all instances of a______ , a
process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighboring
sound.
11. M______ onset principle (MOP), when there is a choice as to where to place a
consonant, it is put into the onset rather than the coda.
12. The e______ condition is the more specific rule applies first.
13. A s______ must have a nucleus or peak, which is often the task of a vowel.
However, sometimes it is also possible for a consonant to play the part of a nucleus.
Consonant [m, n] also have such functions in English.
14. S_______ refers to the degree of force used in producing a syllable.
15. S _____ are those aspects of speech that involve more than single sound
segments.
II. Judge whether each of the following statements is true or false. Put a T for
true or F for false in the brackets in front of each statement.
1.( ) Vocal organs are those parts of the human body involved in the production of
speech: the lungs, the windpipe, the throat, the nose and the mouth.
2.( ) The study of sounds is divided into three main areas, articulatory phonetics,
auditory phonetics and perceptual phonetics.
3.( ) IPA: the abbreviation of International Phonetic Alphabet, which is devised by
the International Phonetic Association in 1888 then it has undergone a number of
revisions.
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4.( ) The use of more specific symbols to show more phonetic detail is referred to as
broad transcription.
5.( ) In the production of consonants, place of articulation refers to where in the
vocal tract there is approximation, narrowing, or the obstruction of air.
6.( )Vowels are sound segments produced by a closure in the vocal tract, or by a
narrowing which is so marked that air can not escape without producing audible
friction.
7. ( ) The distinction between vowels and consonants lies in the obstruction of
airstream.
8.( ) phonological analysis relies on the principle that certain sounds cause changes
in the meaning of a word or phase, whereas other sounds do not. A simple
methodology to demonstrate this is to take a word, replace one sound by another, and
see whether a different meaning results. This technique, called the maximum pairs test,
can be used to find out which sound substitutions cause differences of meaning.
9.( ) Distinctive features was first developed by Roman Jacobson in the 1940s as a
means of working out a set of phonological contrasts or oppositions to capture
particular aspects of language sounds
10. ( ) A syllable must have a nucleus or peak, which must be the task of a vowel.
11. ( ) The principle suprasegmental features are syllable, stress, tone, and
intonation.
12.( ) In general situations, notional words are normally unstressed while
structural words are stressed.
13.( ) In Chinese tone changes are used in a different way, affecting the meanings
of individual words.
14.( ) The regular past tense form in English is pronounced as [d] when the word
ends with a voiceless consonant, [t] when it ends with a voiced sound, and [id] when
it ends with [t] or [d].
15. ( ) Intonation involves the occurrence of recurring fall-rise patterns, each of
which is used with a set of relatively consistent meanings, either on single words or
on groups of varying length.
III. Give the description of the following sound segments in English.
1) [t]
2) [k]
3) [l]
4) [h]
5) [e]
IV. Give the IPA symbols for the sounds that correspond to the descriptions
below.
1) voiced alveolar stop
2) voiceless labiodental fricative
3) palatal approximant
4) voiceless bilabial stop
5) high front lax unrounded vowel
V. Define the following terms.
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phonetics
speech organs
phonology
articulatory phonetics
speech organs
voicing
International Phonetic Alphabet
consonant
manner of articulation
place of articulation
vowel
Cardinal Vowels
Coarticulation
semi-vowel
minimal pairs test
phoneme
allophone
assimilation
Elsewhere Condition
distinctive features
Maximal Onset Principle
syllable
stress
intonation
VI. What are basic requirements of the description of English vowels?
VII. How do phonetics and phonology differ?
Key to supplementary exercises
I. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word, the first letter of which is
already given as a clue.
1. Phonetics
2. Phonology
3. Consonants
4.manner
5.Coarticulation
6. Received
7. General
8. Phoneme
9. broad
10. assimilation
11. Maximal
12. elsewhere
13. syllable
14. Stress
15. Suprasegmental
II. Judge whether each of the following statements is true or false. Put a T for true or
F for false in the brackets in front of each statement.
1. T
2. F
3. T
4. F
5. T
6. F
7. T
8. F
9. T
10. F
11. T
12. F
13. T
14. F
15. T
III. Give the description of the following sound segments in English.
1) [t]
2) [k]
3) [l]
4) [h]
5) [e]
IV. Give the IPA symbols for the sounds that correspond to the descriptions below.
1) voiced alveolar stop
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2) voiceless labiodental fricative
3) palatal approximant
4) voiceless bilabial stop
5) high front lax unrounded vowel
V. Define the following terms.(answer omitted)
VI. The description of English vowels needs to fulfill four basic requirements:
1) The height of tongue raising (high, mid, low);
2) The position of the highest part of the tongue (front, central,back);
3) The length of tenseness of the vowel (tense vs. lax or long vs. short);
4) Lip-rounding (rounded vs. unrounded).
VII. Both phonetics and phonology study human speech sounds but they differ in their
focus.
Phonetics is the study of how speech sounds are produced, transmitted and
perceived. The study of sounds is divided into three main areas, articulatory phonetics,
acoustic phonetics and perceptual or auditory phonetics.
Phonology is the study of the sound patterns and sound systems of languages. It
aims to discover the principles that govern the way sounds are organized in languages,
and to explain the variations that occur.
In phonology we normally begin by analyzing an individual language,say English,
in order to determine its phonological structure, i.e. which sound units are used and
how they are put together. Then we compare the properties of sound systems in
different languages in order to make hypotheses about the rules that underline the use
of sounds in them, and ultimately we aim to discover the rules that underline the
sound patterns of all languages.
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