Today

 What is Phonetics?
 Decoding the speech stream
 Principles of phonetic
transcription
 IPA

Readings: 3.1-3.2
 Phonetics
 The scientific study of human speech
sounds
 How they are produced (articulatory)
 How they are perceived (auditory)
 Their physical properties (acoustic)
 X-ray movie
“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
 Decoding the speech stream
 The speech signal is a continuous stream
of sound
 No ‘spaces’ between words in speech
 Decoding the speech stream

How many words in the following sentence?

Chicken Little ...rather than his
parsed as actual
saying: warning:

“The sky is “This guy is

falling” falling.”
(untrue)... (true)
 Decoding the speech stream

How many sounds in the following words?

‘leaf’ ‘feel’
Decoding the speech stream
‘leaf’ [lif] vs. ‘feel’ [fil] forwards

‘feel’ [fil] vs. ‘leaf’ [lif] backwards

‘lull’ vs. ‘llul’ backwards

 Decoding the speech stream
 Sounds in a string are continuous, yet we
perceive them as discrete, separate
sounds
 Goals for Phonetics section:
 Be able to identify human speech sounds
 Learn symbols used for transcribing
speech sounds
 Describe and classify sounds according
to articulatory properties
 Phonetic transcription
 The most widely used tool in phonetics is
transcription
 International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA)
 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
 Why use the IPA?
 Some languages have no writing system
 There is no one-to-one correspondence
between letters and sounds:
 Same letter — different sounds
dad, father, about, many
 Same sound — different letters
believe, people, amoeba, tree
 Several letters used for one sound
shoot, nation, chord, chip
 Why use the IPA?
 One letter used for several sounds
box, use [baks] [juz]
 Some letters have no sound
gnaw, sword, debt, damn, bomb

[nç]...[bam]
 IPA preview
 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]
 IPA consonants
[p] spit, tip, appear Hints:
[b] ball, globe, amble -Pay attention to how you
[t] stack, pat, stuffed, pterodactyl SAY it; not how it’s spelled.

[d] dip, card, drop, loved -check your pronunciation

against a native speaker’s.
[k] skit, joker, attic, exceed
[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’.