Here is a list of aspects of suprasegmentals

length tone intonation stress syllable structure

Let us look at each one in turn. Length simply refers to the perceived duration of a unit it may be on the segmental level (when it refers to the length of vowels), or on the suprasegmental level (for instance the length of syllables). Length is one of the factors that makes a syllable seem more prominent. We will not discuss it any further.

Tone and intonation refer to the change of pitch within a word or on the level of the utterance. Different languages use the change of pitch in different ways. In English, for instance, you can use the change of pitch to change your intonation, thus showing some shades of meaning (such as surprise, being annoyed, etc.), but you cannot change the lexical meaning of the word. Listen to some examples here the name Amelia (being pronounced by Ladefoged) in different ways: addressing her, her name is _____, did you say ______? (I did not quite catch it), surprised (as in Amelia did that?) and reprimanding her (telling her off like a child). Languages that use pitch in such a way are called intonation languages. There are also tone languages, which use tone distinctively -- in such languages tone may completely change the lexical meaning of a word. The standard example is Chinese, where the sound sequence ma may mean completely different things:

Listen to the sounds here: mother, hemp, horse, scold. Finally, there are pitch-accent languages such as Croatian, which are in between the two previous groups (remember our beloved examples of onions, ports; dogs and belts . Stress refers to the way in which we make a syllable more prominent in various ways. We will not discuss it any further here. Syllable structure is an aspect that we will not discuss at all -- you will learn more about stress and syllable structure in your Phonetics and phonology course...

Introduction As we have seen, we can describe speech by talking about the way in which it is produced, which is the subject matter of articulatory phonetics. Our descriptions may be based on some objective measurements of the production of speech, for instance, they may include x-rays of the vocal tract, movements of the tongue etc. Although this is useful, it may be sometimes difficult to do and unpractical, because it requires that a person be hooked up to a machine as s/he produces an utterance.

So, the issue is, can we also analyze recorded speech?

Yes, of course and this is the subject matter of acoustic phonetics. Acoustic phonetics deals with the properties of sound waves. It is useful because it is the only objective way of analyzing recorded speech, and may be helpful in explaining e.g. why certain sounds are confused with others, and may help specify sounds which are otherwise difficult to describe.

Sound waves In speech, air particles oscillate around their rest point. As a particle moves it causes a change in air pressure. These variations in air pressure are called sound waves. Here is an illustration of what happens (from Crystal 1997: 112):

In other words, what happens is that particle 1 (P1) moves from its "at rest" position to a position at the time 0 (T0), "bumping" into the particle P2. P2 in turn "bumps into" P3, etc. etc. In this way a sound wave is created. Alternately, this may be shown as a waveform, which is a graph of the pressure wave when particles move in this way. Here is an example of a waveform:

So, if this is a sound wave, in order to be able to say something about its characteristics you need to measure it somehow. Here is what you can measure:

amplitude (how far an air particle moves to and fro around its rest point) frequency (how fast variations in air pressure occur) various correlations between the two, e.g.: intensity

We will not talk about amplitude in great detail. Here are a few facts about frequency and intensity. Frequency A single to-and-fro movement of an air particle is called a cycle. Frequency is the number of cycles per second, i.e. the rate of the variations in air pressure. It is measured in Hertz (Hz), and 1 Hz = 1 cycle per second. Humans can hear frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 000 Hz. The basic frequency at which a sound vibrates is F0 (F nought). Frequencies important for speech range between 100 Hz and 4000 Hz. When we speak the fundamental frequency is determined by the vibrations of the vocal folds and determines the pitch. Keep in mind that the vocal folds are folds of tissue that are more like linen flapping in the wind than like a string of a guitar. That means that they produce a complex tone, that is not as simple and regular as the one seen in the sound wave presented above. In addition to the fundamental frequency, there are also other frequencies produced when we speak. The frequencies which are most strongly amplified are called formants. Here is an illustration of the sound spectrum of /i:/, with F1 and F2 marked:

This graph presents the frequencies which are amplified the most -- they make up F1 and F2. It is important to remember that these frequencies appear in all voiced sounds of a language (i.e. whenever vocal folds vibrate, because vocal folds produce them), but they are most easily identifiable in vowels, and they, in fact, distinguish vowels. So, F1 and F2 actually identify a particular vowel of a language. You can also hear this -- here are the links to the things we heard in class (from Ladefoged's site): only F1; only F2; only F3; F1, F2 & F3; full recording. These recordings illustrate the importance of each frequency in speech. Formants may also be seen in a different representation called a spectrogram, which shows time (on the horizontal axis), frequency (on the vertical axis) and intensity (reflected by the darkness of the line). The following is a spectrogram of /i:/ on which I marked F1 and F2:

Sound intensity Sound intensity refers to various factors (frequency and amplitude) that relate to energy with which the sound is produced. The unit of intensity is decibel (dB). It is defined in relation to the reference sound pressure level (=0.0002 dynes (unit of force) per square centimeter). This means that the intensity of 90 dB is 90 times greater than the reference level. The scale is logarithmic, which means that an increase in 10 dB is roughly equivalent to doubling of loudness. Here are some examples: 0 dB = threshold of audibility 30 dB = whispered conversation 50 dB = quiet office 60 dB = conversation at 1 m 75 dB = shouting 120 dB = amplified rock band (threshold of pain!) 130 dB = four-engined jet aircraft at 30 m

Conclusion So, we have seen here that we can measure various aspects of sound waves. These measurements can show the differences between various sounds, and we mentioned two things that can be measured -- frequency and intensity. When we measure frequency of a sound wave, especially one produced by a vowel, formants are the frequencies that stand out. We heard the way in which formants contribute to the sound of speech. Apart from hearing them, we can use various types of illustrations, such as spectrograms and sound spectra. One other thing that we can measure is the intensity of sound that relates to the energy with which the sound is produced.