Slides from class 3 of my phonetics course for students in Communication Disorders.

1. Phonetics ~ Class 3
CD 233
Lavoie

2. Start to obtain our book
You will need Clinical Phonetics by
Shriberg and Kent, either 3rd or 4th
edition. Either is fine. If you buy the 3rd,
I’ll provide a PDF of the new chapter.

3. Words to transcribe (1)
fear gear wear
meat sweat great
tough cough dough

4. Words to transcribe (2)
perk cork work
chef shoe sure
who whoa white

5. Today’s plan
Go over HWs and quiz
Review minimal pairs
Explore words
Focus on syllables
 Describe and label parts of syllables, use in
describing poetry

6. Assignments
Any questions on HWs 3 and 4?
Any questions about the quiz?
Coming up HW 5 (available) and 6 (on
picking out stress)

7. Make minimal pairs for underlined
 Bind
 Lean
 Red
 Wish
 Look
Win
 Path
 Job
 Trash
 Foam

8. Minimal pairs or not?
 One, sun
 Clasp, grasp
 Learn, turn
 Slice, nice
 Spite, spot
 Respire, perspire
 Large, charge
 Feud, rude
 Thrash, crash
 Gerbil, journal

9. Words
On cards
Write a definition of “word”
Shuffle them around to each other

10. All words…
What properties do all words have?
What’s true of a word but not a phrase

11. Are these words?
 Whatchmacallit
 Ain’t
 Gonna, Wanna
 Unthaw
 Mrs.
 Woot
 Chillax
 8
%
 Huh
 Nother
 Ginormous
 Y’all, y’ins, youse
 Bromance

12. Words have at least one syllable
How many syllables in these words?
Thin, smoosh, captive, toy, volcano,
banana, hummingbird, oregano,
prepubescent, antediluvian, eighths,
monologue, foil, fire, vial, vile, flour,
flower

13. Words have a stressed syllable
Every content word has at least one
stressed syllable
Function words might not have a
stressed syllable because they glom
onto other words

14. Stress pairs
Words which differ just by stress
Proper name variants based on stress
 Louis vs. Luis vs. Louise
 Mary vs. Marie
 Target vs. Target
 Steve Urkel vs. Stefan Urquelle

15. Word stress, I
 Also called lexical stress
 “lexicon” is our mental dictionary
 What is word stress?
 Additional salience on the syllable nucleus
 Longer, higher pitch, slightly louder, greater
muscular effort
 Often hard for people to hear, whether native
speakers or learners
 How important is word stress?

16. Word stress, II
 Some accents of English are hard to
understand because of stress and rhythm
 Indian English
 Chinese- and Japanese-accented English
 Correct stress is very important for
comprehensibility and naturalness
 Not really a problem for children, but definitely
a problem for adults learning English

17. Word stress, III
Because stress impacts pronunciation
It’s important in transcription
Marked with ˈ before syllable

18. Word stress – 1 syllable words
Eat
Drink
Plump
Burp

19. Word stress – 2 syllable words
 Over
 Toddy
 Booty
 Supper
 Sherry
 Susan
 Secret
 Revel
 Overt
 Today
 Boutique
 Suppose
 Charade
 Suzanne
 Secrete
 Reveal

20. Word stress – 2 syllable words
 Sherry, over, rebel (noun), giant, picture,
heating, easy, eagle, Easter, even, owner,
ocean, inner, index, infant, teacher, plural,
certain, larynx, practice
 Charade, overt, rebel (verb), today, ahead,
allow, Elaine, elect, erupt, enough, obese,
oblige, inspire, infect, intrude, involve, berserk,
suppose, aware, reveal

21. Transcribing stress pairs
Compress
Digest
Project
Record
Contract

22. Stress impacts transcription
Remember, stress determines:
 wedge and r-colored 3 vs.
 schwa and r-colored schwa
“Pervert,” “stirrer,” “fervor”
“Above”
Use of flap depends on stress

23. Importance of stress in poetry
Classical poetry depends upon rhymes
and the location of stress in words
Stress is on the nucleus
 Two households, both alike in dignity, In
fair Verona, where we lay our scene
 Bubble bubble toil and trouble
 Fire burn and cauldron bubble

24. Figuring out stress ourselves
 Injure
 Design
 Arrive
 Worry
 Bellow
 Below
 Booties
 Boutiques
 Marky
 Marquee
 Convert (n/v)
 Contract (n/v)
 Pervert (n/v)

25. Word stress – 3 syllable words
 1st: Energy, operate, organize, noisily,
horrible, insulin, mystify, caraway, Michigan
 2nd: Memorial, assumption, Missouri,
confusion, repulsive, computer, charisma,
aroma, contagious
 3rd: Japanese, volunteer, minuet, reimburse,
decompose, reapply, masquerade, contradict

26. Word stress – 4 syllable words
1st: Secondary, calculator
2nd: Psychology, evaporate, certificate,
industrial
3rd: Politician, reputation, Arizona
4th: Hullaballoo

27. Pick out the stressed syllable
 Crocodile
 Artichoke
 Misconstrue
 Fiasco
 Pioneer
 Vanilla
 Calendar
 Pistachio
 Portfolio
 Arizona
 Arabia
 Armadillo
 Filipino
 Millennia

28. Word stress – 5 syllable words!
 Electricity
 Hippopotamus
 Incompatible
 Refrigerator
 Sociology
 Technological
 Organization
 Participation
 Magnification
 Examination

29. Maine English
 Lobster Promo
 http://www.lobsterfro
mmaine.com/cookin
gvideopop.aspx?vID
=8
 Maine Lobsterman
 http://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=FZDpx1aLovc

30. Syllables
Quick Write
What do you already know about
syllables?
 Types of syllables
 Defining syllable
 What’s a syllable good for?

31. Literary devices with vowels
Assonance (review)
 Repeat vowels in nearby words; can be
subtle and hard to spot
 Without looking back, can you remember
any of the assonant lines from last week?
Regular old rhyme
 Depends on syllable shape/structure
 Leading us into SYLLABLE STRUCTURE

32. Notating syllable structure
C = consonant, V = vowel
CVC = syllable
First C is the onset
V is the nucleus
Last C is the coda

33. Parts of a syllable
Elements in (parens) are optional
Syllable σ = (onset) + rime
Rime = nucleus + (coda)

34. Types of syllables
Open syllables
 CV — no coda
Closed syllables
 CVC —coda C “closes” the syllable
These types can describe the kinds of
syllables someone produces

35. What do we have in English?
What kinds of syllables allowed?
Open? Closed?
How about clusters of consonants in
onset or coda position?
What clusters does English allow?
What’s our smallest allowable word?

36. English consonant clusters
 Longest possible initial cluster is CCC
 split /splɪt/ and strudel /ʃtrudəl/, beginning with /s/
or /ʃ/ and ending with /l/ or /r/
 Longest possible final cluster is CCCCC
 angsts /æŋksts/, though rare
 Four final consonants are fairly common:
 twelfths /twɛlfθs/, sixths /sɪksθs/, glimpsed
/ɡlɪmpst/

37. Exploring syllable structure
 English is relatively rich in consonant clusters
 As opposed to Japanese, Hawaiian, Maori
 Which don’t allow any consonant clusters (except
Japanese clusters with j)
 Or compared to Georgian CCCCCCCCVC
 /ɡvbrdɣvnis/ he's plucking us
 Allowed syllable patterns are part of a
language’s phonology

38. Literary devices with consonants
Alliteration
 Repeat initial consonants of words
 Often found in tongue twisters with slight
variation (shine my city shoes)
 Headlines in less reputable news outlets
Consonance
 Repeat the final consonants of words

39. Alliterative verse
 Noble English tradition, it’s ONSETS
 Beowulf (Old English)
 Moors and marshes; Woe-stricken warriors
 Sir Gawain & the Green Knight (Middle Eng.)
 The hair of his head matched that of his horse
 Fair-flowing locks enfolded his shoulders
 A beard as big as a bush hung over his breast

40. Beowulf: Grappling with Grendel
 Cunningly creeping, a spectral stalker
 slunk through the night. The spearmen were
sleeping who ought to have held the high-horned
house, all except one …
 no more would the murderer drag under
darkness whomever he wished.
 Wrath was wakeful, watching in hatred; hot-hearted
Beowulf was bent upon battle.

41. More alliterative verse
Richard Wilbur’s poem Junk opens with:
 An axe angles from my neighbor's ashcan;
 It is hell's handiwork, the wood not hickory.
 The flow of the grain not faithfully followed.
 The shivered shaft rises from a shellheap
 Of plastic playthings, paper plates.

42. Channel 7 News Headlines
 Weather Worries
 Drenched by Downpours
 Horror & Heartache
 Fatal Fire Beer on the Bus
 Library Lewdness
 Caught on Camera
 Immigration Nation (assonance/rhyme)

43. Still more alliterative verse
W. H. Auden wrote poems, including
The Age of Anxiety, in alliterative verse
 Now the news. Night raids on Five cities.
Fires started. Pressure applied by pincer
movement In threatening thrust. Third
Division Enlarges beachhead. Lucky
charm Saves sniper. Sabotage hinted In
steel-mill stoppage…

44. Consonance in poetry
Boneyard Rap
 Final consonants kind of clink around
 This poetry manipulates CODAS
 http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/
singlePoem.do?poemId=382

45. Sibilance
Special kind of consonance, using the
sibilant consonants: s, ʃ, z, ʒ
Sibilants have a hissing sound; can
create a mood
Sibilants stand out “shhhh!” “pssst!”
The serpent hisses where the sweet bird
sings - Thomas Hardy

46. More sibilance
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of
each purple curtain. (“The Raven”)
“… I guess
How you miss the English spring, the way
A shower-cloud over a hillside spills
Between sunlight and sunlight, slowly…”
 From Ted Walker’s “Letter to Barbados”

47. Rare stress-based tongue twister
Transcribe it and then say it
“Many an anemone is an enemy
anemone”
A business in my home town:
“A cappella alpacas”

48. Nicknames
I hope you were thinking about
nicknames and shortened references
What’s the relationship between
common nicknames and the stress?
Examples of Christopher, Randolph,
David, William, Kevin nicknames

53. Distribution of vowels
See the new sheet
With open and closed syllables
With various final consonants and how
to transcribe
One blank side, one filled side
Try to fill the blank side yourself

54. Vowel variation
 Economics
 Route
 Semiformal
 Aunt
 Produce
 Harassment
 Envelope
 Address

55. Vowel variation 2
 Hurry
 Adult
 Creek
 Roof
 Hoodlum
 Volatile
 Pecan
 Productivity

56. Cot/caught merger
Also called “low back” merger
50% of US merges them now and it’s
spreading…
From Telsur
 http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/ma
ps/Map1.html

57. Low back vowels: A, O, Å
A
 Cot
 Don
 Stock
 Father
 Lot
 Mom
O
 Caught
 Dawn
 Stalk
 Dog
 Fall
 Long

58. Low back vowels: A, O, Å
A
 Pond
 Fonz
 Odd
 Collar
 Body
 Wok
O
 Pawned
 Fawns
 Awed
 Caller
 Bawdy
 Walk

59. Other names for the merger
 Hottie
 Otto
 Gotti
 Bobble
 Cod
 Lager
 Pod
 Yon
 Cock
 Haughty
 Auto
 Gaudy
 Bauble
 Cawed
 Logger
 Pawed
 Yawn
 Caulk

60. Why do we do what we do?
 Not only do I want you to learn phonetics
 I want you to hear phonetics all around you
 And appreciate everyday, non-technical use of
phonetics
 And describe it with our technical terms
 We pull examples from everywhere because I
hope that we can keep class interesting

61. Phonemes and allophones
 Important concept, our first dip into it with
 ASPIRATION
 Puff of air characteristic of English p, t, k
 Not always produced the same
 Differences conditioned by the environment
 When onsets to stressed syllable, they’re aspirated

62. Amount of aspiration
 Record
 Conduct
 Suppose
 Toddy
 Record
 Conduct
 Supper
 Today

63. Maine English OLD
 Maine Lobsterman
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZDpx1aLovc
 Chippah and Randy on “Wicked”
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-
euti6iPr9g&feature=related
 Cumberland County Fair
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VE2f-dg7qI
 Maine Clam Diggers
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZJeRs_-FkA

64. Diphthongs, /r/-colored V practice
 Maestro
 Flour
 Oyster
 Prowess
 License
 Coin
 Purpose
 Sherbet
 Converge
 Upper
 War
 Lard