Questions tagged [phonetics]
The study of the production and perception of sounds or "phones".
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Why did Moti Lieberman associate 子 with onset, and 了 with coda?
Screenshot's from YouTube. I don't speak Chinese and don't understand the relevance of these ideograms. I emailed him twice, but after 5 months, got no reply.
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Why do I autonomously whisper out loud what I'm typing? [on hold]
For about a month now, there's been this weird thing I do where like, when I finish typing something, I'll whisper it out loud to myself. At first, it was something I'd do when I found what I was ...
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2answers
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Is sonority phonological or phonetic?
I've seen several mentions of "sonority" in different works, most of which define it as something like "how loud a particular sound is in relation to other speech sounds".
This seems like something ...
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How to synthesize French vowels
I am trying to synthesize the French vowels [o] and [ɔ] for running a perception experiment. I have been using the Praat Vocal Toolkit and got pretty nice results with the following formant values: F1(...
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2answers
134 views
Can medial /t/ and /d/ before syllabic /n/ be distinguished easily?
Addendum (0:00am, June 27th, JST): After reading Draconis' answer, I did a little more research and added my findings below the horizontal line.
Can medial /t/ and /d/ before syllabic /n/ be easily ...
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1answer
128 views
IPA Sound used for grapheme 'R' in some English dialects?
A number of years ago, I was working with some friends on conlanging for a fictional society. At the time, we didn’t know about IPA or formalized sound descriptions like “voiceless ...
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1answer
32 views
Interactive class exercises with Praat
I’m teaching a seminar crash course in linguistics to first year undergrads next term. It’s just 3 one hour lectures, and should be fun and engaging. I want it to be hands-on, and give students a ...
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59 views
Source on approximant fortition
I'm starting a project that examines the phonetics of palatal approximant fortition (with a variety of outcomes) in several dialects of Spanish.
There's a great deal of existing Spanish linguistics ...
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Examples of languages with complex “formules de politesse”
French uses complex word arrangements to say "best regards" and "yours sincerely" to finish well written letters, i.e.:
Nous vous prions d’agréer, Monsieur, l’expression de nos sentiments respectueux ...
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1answer
77 views
Where does Texan English derive its l-vocalization?
My English teacher grew up in Texas and unsurprisingly her native dialect is Texan English. I noticed that when intervocalic /l/ is followed by /i/, the /l/ is elided and /y/ takes its place. For ...
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1answer
78 views
Marking phoneme boundaries - how to decide on the transitions?
I'm currently labelling some singing data, which contains very slow transitions between vowels. The data often have prenuclear glides and diphthongs together. The picture below is an instance (the ...
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phoneme-level forced aligners?
I am aware of a few available aligners: P2FA, ProsodyLab Aligner, Montreal Aligner, etc.
Specifically, I'm trying to use the Chinese version so I tried Chinese P2FA. It can align syllables quite well,...
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1answer
105 views
Are there languages that can speak of continous things without discretizing them?
All languages I know of discretize qualities when trying to describe them. For example, languages generally sample a few words for describing a range of continous things like feelings ('terrible', '...
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3answers
90 views
Formant frequencies of consonants
In the old days, phones were defined by the requisite articulation, both consonants and vowels. As time wore on and science and technology advanced, vowels became better defined by their acoustic ...
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2answers
1k views
Non-African Click Languages
Paralinguistic clicks are quite common across world's languages. But paralinguistic clicks usually appears as ideophones. But why is Africa the only continent that uses click consonants? Are there any ...
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820 views
Why is vowel phonology represented in a trapezoid instead of a square?
Given that the internal area of the human mouth is approximately a square, why the vowels pronunciation chart is usually represented by a trapezoid?
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4answers
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Is the schwa sound consistent?
The first syllable in "about" (ə'baʊt) is schwa, so is the second one in the "salad" ('sæləd), but iv'e never heard them pronounced the same way.
in salad it sounds more like the i in "trick".
...
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British English offglides
The offglide of the English diphthongs /aʊ/ and /əʊ/ is represented by the vowel /ʊ/. In other languages, such as Portuguese and Spanish, they are represented in the same way, but they sound ...
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2answers
131 views
Why do some linguists say vowel length isn't contrastive in Italian?
That's what I get in Caillou & Leite (2009) and the article "Main stress in Italian nonce nouns" by Martin Krämer. The latter brings a case where vowel length is proven to be contrastive (ancóra/...
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phonetics name of vibration in the wind pipe [duplicate]
A very angry, sonorant voice may have the vocal lips, wind pipe and whole throat vibrating.
For example, we may see this as phoneme in e.g. imitation of a wolfs growl, "grrr", a game show's bad-...
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74 views
Phonetic similarity between alveolar and uvular trill
In a few languages of Europe (French,German,Italian),these phonemes are in free variation. To my ears they sound quite distinct,but maybe it is because I lack sufficient knowledge about their acoustic ...
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qTA model and lexical tone
I have only recently come across the qTA model and it seemed interesting, but so far it does not fit my connected speech data at all - words with the same tone come out with wildly different pitch ...
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1answer
57 views
Is there a difference between foreign and native accents?
As the title says, are there any linguistic differences between accents acquired from birth/childhood and accents ued by adult language learners who speak the language fluently, but still with a ...
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1answer
84 views
The TRAP vowel: a or ä?
If my mouth is open and my tongue is completely relaxed, do I make an [a] or an [ä]?
Which one is more common for the TRAP vowel in British English?
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3answers
197 views
What exactly is the definition of a syllable?
I do not consider myself a linguist. I just teach English to Japanese audience. So please excuse my ignorance if this is too basic a question.
What exactly is the definition of a syllable? What I ...
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Experience with PENTATrainer?
I recently discovered the PentaTrainer scripts and PentaTrainer2 plug-in for Praat. These are potentially very useful to me and it's great that all of the underlying work has been made available like ...
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1answer
35 views
With SSML phoneme tags using IPA phonetic symbols, how can I insert pauses to slow down pronounciation?
Note
For my text to speech engine (I use Cereproc, William Voice).
The engine can be used on the website here:
https://www.cereproc.com/
and it supports the ssml tags used in this question..
...
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1answer
95 views
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1answer
147 views
Phonetic similarity between *s* and *j*
I've recently discovered that Latin s at the end of words became the palatal approximant j in Italian. I remember reading that this process is also observed in some Occitan dialects,so it cannot be ...
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1answer
147 views
Mechanism of glottal stop - effect on tension in vocal cords
I understand that vocal pitch basically depends on tension in the vocal cords, which I'm visualising in terms of the cords being stretched along their length.
I understand that the glottal stop is ...
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2answers
72 views
What is the most precise/accurate/reliable way of determining whether a speech sound has been reproduced correctly by a person?
What is the most precise/accurate/reliable way of determining whether a speech sound has been reproduced correctly by a person?
I am looking at something like perhaps an inspection of a person's ...
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3answers
655 views
What's the difference between /ɪ/ and /i(ː)/?
In English there's the vowel sound /ɪ/ as in "bin" and /i(ː)/ as in "been".
My girlfriend, who is Greek, cannot perceive the difference, but to me they sound very different.
Is the difference ...
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3answers
103 views
Identifying phonemic boundaries in Praat
I am trying to segment some connected speech in Praat, and want to get the boundaries between phonemes as accurate as possible. I am finding that in many cases, one sound blends into another and it's ...
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Is there any language where stress can be comprised of diminished expiratory force?
I can swear I read an online article that gave a resouding yes to that question but I've lost it and my memory is uhm, not the best so I'd like a confirmation.
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3answers
327 views
What are the characteristics of a glide in English?
I’m wondering how exactly do you make a “w” and “y” sound in English. These two are considered the glides of English, but what exactly makes it a glide? What are the characteristics of a glide sound? ...
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1answer
75 views
Can anyone confirm if this is a true released glottal stop?
It sounds like one to me but I'm not sure regarding how it is made. I noticed that when I consciously try to close my glottis the glottal stop is much more soft while when I don't think about closing ...
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2answers
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Does the voicing of morpheme-initial /z d/ in German transmit to the preceding voiceless consonant in the same consonant cluster?
Here are som examples:
[t͡sʰ], [t͡s] or [ʣ]?
Wie alt sind Sie?
nicht sehr
[s] or [z]?
Was sind Sie von Beruf?
Das Sofa
[st], [sd] or [zd]?
das du weißt
The consonant clusters ...
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22 views
Differential information load of frequency ranges
Are there any studies trying to quantify the amount of information carried by different frequency ranges in speech in different languages?
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1answer
230 views
Shift from /sk/ → /ʃ/
I'm not sure if this is a legitimate question to ask,but I noticed this sound change in a few germanic languages, such as Old English and German. How did it happen?
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2answers
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How does the Sankt Goar isogloss work?
The Sankt Goar line crosses the german town of Sankt Goar and separates the dialects that have t in words like wat and dat and the dialects that have s in the corresponding words was and das. Is this ...
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2answers
875 views
Pronunciation of umlaut vowels in the history of German
I know that the umlaut vowels were also written as ae oe and ue, and this orthography shows the process of assimilation with a high vowel. But were these vowels ever actually pronounced as a diphthong,...
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2answers
2k views
How did Ancient Greek 'πυρ' become English 'fire?'
fire is derived from the Ancient Greek πυρ. My question is: how did the plosive become a fricative?
I believe pyre is also derived from πυρ; why is it that pyre didn't also undergo this "...
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1answer
279 views
Is there any other language containing the sound of the “evanescent l” in Venetian?
Venetian (the Italo-Romance language spoken in the area of Italy roughly corresponding to the Veneto region) has a weird sound which is usually called l evanescente (evanescent l). It varies ...
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4answers
100 views
Are there other aspirated phones in English?
It is known that English has a set of aspirated consonants, the allophones [pʰ], [tʰ] and [kʰ] of /p/, /t/, /k/, respectively. Are there other consonants with aspirated allophones? In which cases do ...
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1answer
28 views
Experiment design: forced choise test for auditory recognition
I need help in experiment design.
As an analogy, lets take English: I want to test if speakers can distinguish between the the word "red" and "read" if listening to recordings of it.
I want to do ...
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2answers
139 views
Does assimilation of voice produce different phonemes, or just allophones?
During assimilation of voice, voiced consonants become voiceless and vice versa: s - z, d - t, etc.
cats ([ts])
dogs ([ɡz])
missed ([st])
whizzed ([zd])
Are these sound pairs different phonemes, or ...
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1answer
67 views
What does a long mid-high unrounded back vowel sound like?
I'm trying to figure out what the Livonian character ȱ sounds like. As far as I can tell, it's a long mid-high unrounded back vowel. In IPA it seems to be written as /ɤː/ but that seems to be a non-...
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4answers
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Cause: [z] --> [s] at the end
Someone said that there is a sound beginning [z], turning into [s] at the end of words like cause. Maybe, this is just a recommendation on how to pronounce English consonants correctly, but if it is ...
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1answer
51 views
The difference between [w] and [u] (especially between the states of the lips)
While searching labialization on the Wikipedia, it is easy to find these statements: 'Labialized sounds involve the lips <...> When vowels involve the lips, they are called rounded.'
In Russian, ...
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2answers
45 views
Number in the upper lefthand corner of Praat soundwave
What does the number in the purple box (0.4649) indicate? I always thought it was a measurement of amplitude, but when I get the RMS amplitude of the highlighted selection, Praat returns a value of 0....
