THE ORGANS OF THE SPEECH

The organs of the speech produce almost all the sounds needed for language. These organs are divided in 2:

Passive articulators: those which remain static during the articulation of sound. (Upper lips, upper teeth, alveolar ridge, hard palate, etc.)

Active articulators: those which move towards these passive articulators to produce various speech sounds in a different way. (Uvula, lower jaw, lower teeth, lower lips, etc., the most important active articulator is the tongue)

1-nasal cavity

2-lips3-teeth

4-aveolar ridge

5-hard palate

6-velum (soft palate)

7-uvula

8-apex (tip) of tongue

9-blade (front) of tongue

10-dorsum (back) of tongue

11-oral cavity

12-pharynx

13-epiglottis

14-larynx

15-vocal cords

16-trachea

17-esophagus

The nature of voicing
The mucosal wave: For voiced sounds, the vocal cords are held together by the action of the arytenoid cartilages, but they are held together less tightly than for a glottal stop.

When air is forced up the trachea from the lungs, at a certain pressure it is able to force its way through the vocal cords, pushing them open. As air passes through the glottis, the air pressure in the glottis falls, because when a gas or liquid runs through a constricted passage, its velocity increases (the Venturi tube effect). This increase in velocity results in a drop in pressure of that gas or liquid (the Bernouilli principle). Because of the drop in pressure, the vocal cords snap together, at the lower edge first, closing again. The cycle then begins again. A single cycle of opening and closing takes in the region of 1/100th second: therefore, the cycle repeats at rates in the region of 100 times per second. This rate is too rapid for the human ear to be able to discriminate each individual opening/closing of the vocal cords. However, we perceive variations in the overall rate of vibration as changes in the pitch of the voice, "pitch" being the perceptual correlate of acoustic frequency.

Voicelessness: If the vocal cords are held apart, air can flow between them without being obstructed, so that no noise is produced by the larynx. In voiceless fricatives such as [f], [s], [ʃ], [ʂ], [θ ], [ç], [x], and [ χ], the vocal cords are held apart. If there is a sufficiently high rate of airflow through the open glottis, a quiet disruption of the air results (whisper). The glottal fricative has whisper phonation, as do whispered vowels, and the aspiration portion of voiceless aspirated stops such as English /p/, /t/, or /k/ in pre-vocalic position. The IPA diacritic [° ], written below a symbol, indicates such voicelessness. Voiceless vowels, nasals and liquids can be transcribed using that diacritic. For stops and fricatives there are separate letters for voiced and voiceless sounds, e.g. [b] (voiced) vs. [p]. In these cases, the voicelessness diacritic can be used to denote a (possibly partially) devoiced realisation of a phoneme that might otherwise be expected to be voiced, such as the pronunciation of the / ɹ/ in /tɹeIn/, "train", in which the /ɹ/ may be devoiced due to its following a voiceless, aspirated /t/.

Breathy voice or murmur: This phonation is a combination of breath and voice, which occurs if the vocal cords do not close completely along their entire length while they are vibrating; the air which flows through the remaining aperture adds whisper to the vocal cord vibrations.
Creaky voice or creak: In this kind of voicing, the vocal cords are stiffened, so that they are very rigid as they vibrate.

Click on this link to watch another useful explanation.
http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eolympics/organs_of_speech/home/index.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_organ
http://tutorpal.com/ipa/organs.html
http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/jcoleman/phonation.htm

ASSIMILATION

Assimilation has a very precise meaning when it’s related to studies of languages. Is a common phonological process bye which the phonetics of a speech segment becomes more like another segment in a word. In other words it’s when a letter (sound) is influenced by the letter (sound) before or after it so that it changes its sound and/or spelling. The word assimilation it self it’s said to be assimilated; it is derived from the latin prefix ad- meaning to and simil- meaning like but, instead of being adsimilated, it has the easier pronunciation of assimilated.

A common example of assimilation is “don’t be silly” where the /n/ and /t/ are assimilated to /m/ by the following /b/, in many accents the natural sound is “dombe silly”.

Assimilation can be synchronic being an active process in a language at a given point in time or diachronic being a historical sound change. There are 4 configurations found: the increase in phonetic similarity may be between adjacent segments or between segments separated by one or more intervening segments; the changes could be in reference to a preceding segment or a following one. Even when all four occur, it changes in regard to a following adjacent segment account for virtually all assimilatory changes. Assimilation to an adjacent segment are vastly more frequent than assimilation to a non-adjacent one.

If a sound changes with reference to a following segment, it is called “regressive assimilation”, the changes with reference to a preceding segment are called “progressive assimilation”. A lot of people find these terms very confusing because they seem to mean the opposite of the intended meaning. To avoid the problem exist a variety of alternative terms. “Regressive assimilation” is also known as right to left, leading or reciprocal assimilation. “Progressive assimilation” is known as left to right or preservative, lagging or lag assimilation.

Occasionally two sounds may influence one another in reciprocal assimilation. When such a change results in a single segment with some of the features of both components, it is known as coalescence or fusion.

1. / t / changes to / p / before / m / / b / or / p /
2. / d / changes to / b / before / m / / b / or / p /
3. / n / changes to / m / before / m / / b / or / p /
4. / t / changes to / k / before / k / or /g/
5. / d / changes to / g / before / k / or / g /
6. / n / changes to /ŋ/ before / k / or / g /
7. / s / changes to /ʃ/ before /ʃ/ or / j /
8. / z / changes to /ʒ/ before /ʃ/ or / j /
9. /θ/ changes to / s / before / s /

http://slb-ltsu.hull.ac.uk/awe/index.php?title=Assimilation_(phonetic)
http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/assimilation.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(linguistics)

entonation and meaning

when we talk with persons can see in us

• mood

• attitud

also when we say something the entonation help us to give at that words the correct mening and the other person can understand the message but the entonation is not the only tool to understand the meanig, the body language is another tool that help and this 2 elements together are know as paralanguage.
for example if we say

• would you please sit down ( angry)
• would you please sit down ( friendly)

with the correct entonation and body language the persons who receive the order is going to receive the correct mening and that person is going to react in base of that.

here there are some website where you can look more information.

http://www.americanaccent.com/intonation.html
http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic4757.html in this page there are a n explanation of a native speaker.

by Maria Paula

who I am?

Hi teacher, I hadn't read the comment where you ask who I am, well I'm Lidia and Zisko is Ramses, sorry but we already had a count with those nicknames, see you .

Diphthongs

The word diphthong is from Greek: it means "two vowels", and we write them as two vowels. A diphthong is a vowel in which the speaker's tongue changes position while it is being pronounced, so that the vowel sounds like a combination of two other vowels. These are tense vowels, they can be long or short.

Diphthong examples:

/eɪ/ as day, pay, say, lay.

/aɪ/ as sky, buy, cry, tie.

/ɔɪ/ as toy, boy.

/ɪə/ as beer, hear.

/eə/ as bear, pair, hair

/ʊə/ as tour, poor.

/əʊ/ as phone, no, go

/aʊ/ as how, cow

The three major diphthongs in Standard English, which are known as phonemic diphthongs, are aɪ (past rode; past p ridden), aʊ, and ɔɪ . All three of these diphthongs are very common, and many people simply think of them as single vowels in some contexts. For example, in the English word ride, the i would be transcribed phonetically as aɪ. Although it appears as a single letter in our writing, it actually consists of two vowels — if you say the word you should be able to hear the two. Similarly, the word how contains the diphthong aʊ at the end, and the word boy contains the diphthong ɔɪ.

English diphthongs chart:

http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/esl0105.html

INTONATION

INTONATION

Intonation is a crucial element or verbal interaction. Authors of teacher’s handbooks and teaching materials agree on this. The communicative importance of intonation should also be reflected in the attention it gets in language teaching.

There are different ways in which human sound is processed. The idea to emphasis is that all this is done in order to communicate.
Intonation is often defined as a speech melody, consisting of different tones, obviously, what melody and intonation have in common is that in both we make our voice go up or down at will. It means, the tones depend on the pitch of the voice.

There are seven or eight tones but the more commons in English are the follow combinations:”down – up”= falling rising tone and “up – down “= rising – falling.

FALL

RISE

RISE – FALL

FALL – RISE

LEVEL ___

The classic example of intonation is the question-statement distinction. For example, northeastern American English, like very many languages, have a rising intonation for each declarative questions (He found it on the street?), and a falling intonation for wh-questions (Where did he find it?) and statement (He found it on the street.) Yes or no question (Did he find it on the street?) often have a rising end, but not always, For example.

He: ready?

She: No.

He: Why?

She: Problems.

He: Problems?

She: Yes.

He: What?

She: Babysitter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)
http://webdelprofesor.ula.ve/humanidades/azapata/materias/phonetics_1/intonation_exercises.pd
BY Ivan and Liliana

WHAT IS PARALANGUAGE? KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS TOPIC

In a previous class, we learnt about paralanguage and intonation, both interesting and entertaining topics. As we saw, there are other ways how we can communicate with others, that means, we do not just use our speech, but we also express feelings, opinions, mandates, etc. through the body language, expressions and gestures, vulume, tone of voice, and in some cases intonation of speech, which are includes in paralanguage.

clarifying all kind of doubts, I am going to give you a definition of paralanguage. It is supposed that paralanguage is not about what something is said but how something is said. According to some authors, paralanguage refers to the nonverbal parts of communication, used to express or modify meaning and convey or share emotions. It also could be conveyed consciously ( for example when you have to communicate something with a purpose) or unconsciously. (just because, or in an spontateous way)

Remember that we listened in the recorging the word yes ten times in different ways. The main purpose of that activity was we realized that throught the intonation of words we can transmit a meaning, and this meaning is the feeling. in the word yes people in the recorging express feeling such as happiness, confidence, annoyance, and others.

I already have said that paralanguage involves lots of elements, one of them is body language, which involves feelings and physical expressions such as body pose, gestures, eye contact, etc. Sometimes the use of body language is an interpersonal way to communicate. In a classroom body language can be useful and helpful for both a better interaction between teacher and students and understanding of words. With imperative forms or in questions we can use a lot body language. for example Would you please sit down? here the teacher can do use of body movement, put his or her hands down, and friendly gestures like a smile.

Here there are some links that could help you to understad better this topic:

http://changingminds.org/techniques/body/body_language.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UrKmfFgDDc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSVk61szem0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjmkb5HCGLA

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:MTBKllM9xPUJ:faculty.tnstate.edu/bchristian1/chapmanpp.ppt+what+is+paralanguage&cd=6&hl=es&ct=clnk&gl=mx

ENGLISH ACCENTS AROUND THE WORLD

As we saw in the class, there are many English accents around the world and we saw examples from the classmates who were presenting this topic. I can make a comparison with the spanish accents because as well as the English ones there are a lot of variations and it depends also on the zone where it is spoken.

A good example on the variety of what I am talking about is the scotish accent because there are few differences from the other accents, I mean some of the sounds are preserved like the difference between /hw/ and /w/.

other special feature of this accent is that is a little bit stressed in some words like: cot and caught because they use this phonetic symbol [ɔ]. I found something very interesting here on the words foot, pull, food and pool, because according to my source thiere is not distinction between them, this means that the vowel that they use is a short one, there is a mixture between the vowels, what it is interesting because our teacher told us the difference and one vowel for foot is short and the other one for food is long. This are some of the different characteristics that we can find in scotish accent and depending on the place the accent may change.

Another example is the australian accent, this kind of accent is likely the most rare English accent that I know because they speak like they were saying a tongue twister, because I believe they don`t open the mouth widely and it seems that they use joined speech in all the words they are saying, a good example of this is that when they speak they say words with /t/ and they sound like /d/, this accent is like the one from South Africa. australian accent tend to use the sound /æ/ instead of the sound /a:/ like "celery" and "salary" they both sound the same in Australian accent.

here you have some links in order to know more about English accents:

http://www.ompersonal.com.ar/omaccents2/Australia.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accents_of_English

Here you have some recording of the different accents:

http://www.world-english.org/listen_english_accents.htm

This is a very interesting video about a girl trying to do several English accents, it is very good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UgpfSp2t6k

Minimal pairs

Minimal pairs are pairs or more words that can often be confused while speaking, we have to be very careful because they only change in one phonological element for example work /wɜ:k/, walk/wɔ:k/ and woke /wəʊk/ although the phonetic transcription changes the pronunciation is almost the same so we have to be very careful about it.

Here there are some examples of minimal pairs

a. Ship - sheep

b. Cheap - chip

c. Cat - cut

d. Kite - coat

e. Bought - boat

f. Hit - heat

g. Bins - beans

In the following colums I enlist the most dificult minimal pairs phonemes

Minimal pairs in vowels

Phonemes	Word Pair
/ɒ/ and /ɔ:/	Cop and cope
/e/ and /eI/	Pen and pain
/I/ and /i:/	List and least
/ʊ/ and /u:/	Look and luke
/æ/ and /ʌ/	Cat and Cut

Minimal pairs in consonats

Phonemes	Word pair
/p/ and /b/	Peach and beach
/b/ and /v/	Boat and vote
/l/ and /r/	Alive and arrive
/θ/ and /s/	Thing and Sing
/dʒ/ and /j/	John and Yawn

CANADIAN AND INDIAN ACCENT

Manuel Alejandro Hernández Mendoza

Last class we looked at some different English accents, some of them caught my attention for example the canadian accent. It is little different from standar English for example the English raising, this phenomenon occurs in dipthongs that are before voiceless consonants e.g. /p/ /t/ /k/ /s/ f/. and talking about vowel dipthong there are some changes of sounds for example the word eye /aI/ turns into /­­Ai/ and /au/ changes to /AU/. it is said that this changes exist because of the French influnce, but it is also said that the phenomenon of raising historically to a similar phenomenon that exists in scottish English. The Scottish Vowel length rule lengthens a wide variety of vowel sounds in several environments, and shorthens them in others; "long" environments include include when the vowel precedes a number of voiced consonants fricatives and /r/, whereas Canadian raising is not limited in this fashion; thus , it may represent a sort of merging of the scots vowel length rule with the general english rule lengtheningvowels before voiced consonants of any sort.

if you want to know how Canadian accent sounds click on the next link
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nzoo6_l0&feature=realted

Indian accent
also knonw as south Asian English is primarily spoken in the Indian Subcontinent. I found something interesting here, for example the use of "isn`t it" a generic question tag, as in

you are lying, isn`t it? instead of You are lying, aren`t you?
i am the best, ìsn`it?

more recent question tags include "no?" used coloquially
he`s here, no?

an important feature talking about vowels is that they used in words that have an "a" in them for example hat, cap, staff, stab the sound of the letter "a" as we use it in spanish. They also add in some words that finish with the sound /t/ the letter "u" example Left, leftU -but, butU.
finally i would like to mention that they stress long words often in the first or second syllabe for example `communicative instead of commu`nicative

if you like you can click ojn the next link in order to know hos indian accent is

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw6RgIf6epQ

JOINED-UP SPEECH

A s s i m i l a t i o n

As we know assimilation is a part of Joined-up speech, is phonological process by which the phonetics of a speech segment becomes more like that of another segment in a word. A common example of assimilation would be "don't be silly" where the /n/ and /t/ in "don't" are assimilated to /m/ and /p/ by the following /b/, where said naturally in many accents and discourse styles "dombe silly".

In assimilation, the phonological patterning of the language, discourse styles and accent are some of the factors that contribute to changes. If a sound changes with reference to a following segment, it is traditionally called "regressive assimilation", the changes with reference to a preceding segment are traditionally called "progressive". Many find these terms confusing, as they seem to mean the opposite of the intended meaning. Regressive assimilation is also known as right-to-left, leading or anticipatory assimilation. Progressive assimilation is also known as left-to-right or preservative, lagging or lag assimilation.

Direction of assimilation:

Regressive assimilation: this is leftward assimilation; the phone assimilates to a preceding phone.

Progressive assimilation: this is rightward assimilation; the phone assimilation to a following phone

The sound that changes is called the assimilated sound.

The sound that causes the change is called the conditioning sound

Progressive Assimilation

Conditioning Sound Assimilated Sound

Regressive Assimilation

Assimilated Sound Conditioning Sound

Let’s see some examples of assimilation in place of articulation to the following consonants:

1. / t / changes to / p / before / m / / b / or / p /
2. / d / changes to / b / before / m / / b / or / p /
3. / n / changes to / m / before / m / / b / or / p /
4. / t / changes to / k / before / k / or /g/
5. / d / changes to / g / before / k / or / g /
6. / n / changes to /ŋ/ before / k / or / g /
7. / s / changes to /ʃ/ before /ʃ/ or / j /
8. / z / changes to /ʒ/ before /ʃ/ or / j /
9. /θ/ changes to / s / before / s /

/ t / changes to / p / before / m / / b / or / p /

best man	pocket money
cat burglar	post mortem
cigarette paper	pot plant
coconut butter	court martial

/ d / changes to / b / before / m / / b / or / p /

bad pain	ground plan
blood bank	hold back
good morning	grand master

/ n / changes to / m / before / m / / b / or / p /

action planning	iron man
American plan	open market
brown bear	open book

/ t / changes to / k / before / k / or /g/

credit card	short cut
cut glass	fat girl

/ d / changes to / g / before / k / or / g /

bad girl	hard cash
bird call	slide guitar
closed game	red carpet

/ n / changes to /ŋ/ before / k / or / g /

action group	open court
common good	roman calendar
common ground	roman catholic

/ s / changes to /ʃ/ before /ʃ/ or / j / followed by a rounded vowel sound

bus shelter	nice yacht
dress shop	space shuttle

/ z / changes to /ʒ/ before /ʃ/ or / j / followed by a rounded vowel sound

cheese shop	where's yours?
rose show	these sheep

/θ/ changes to / s / before / s /

bath salts	earth science
bath seat	fifth set
birth certificate	fourth season
both sexes	fourth summer
Bibliography

http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/assimilation.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(linguistics)