Questions tagged [phonetics]
The study of the production and perception of sounds or "phones".
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Do dialects without the meet-meat merger neutralize the distinction in some contexts?
For many dialects of English (including my own) multiple historical lexical sets are merged into one "FLEECE" set (this diaphoneme can be represented with IPA /iː/).
I've read about the basics of the ...
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How is Donald Duck's voice produced, if not by buccal speech?
The Disney character Donald Duck is well known for his nigh unintelligible voice, which was originated by actor Clarence Nash in the 1930s. I have always heard this manner of speaking described as ...
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How diachronically stable is release type?
Are there examples of languages completely shifting from (vocalic) release of all coda stops to, say, nasal release?
I imagine substrate effects could account for some of these cases (cf. unreleased ...
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Gulf Arabic vowels allophones
No matter how much I browse, I cannot find any true researcher's really precise and accurate data on the issue. Actually, I cannot find any Gulf Arabic Phonology compendium, so any help will be ...
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How to read a spectrogram?
I read some materials online How to Read a Spectrogram, Reading Spectrograms: Consonants, Reading Spectrograms: Vowels. I still have no idea how to analyze a spectrogram. Could anyone explain with the ...
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What's the name for using a letter to represent its name's sound?
It's often whimsical to substitute a single letter for a group of letters phonetically identical to the letter's name.
Such as rewriting "barbecue" as "bar-b-q", or the entirety of William Steig's ...
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Determining how similar audio is to human speech
I was suggested to cross post this question of mine from Stack Overflow. Hopefully my question is within the bounds of this question board!
I am searching for a method of determining the similarity ...
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Patterns of accent changes by non-native English speakers
I am looking for a list of 'accent changes', or pronunciation inaccuracies, non-native English speakers commonly make when speaking English words. The list would obviously be native language specific ...
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Production and dialectology of Dutch /s/
I am trying to learn Dutch and I am struggling to produce the /s/ phoneme in the same way that some (most?) native speakers do. It seems that the usual pronunciation is such that it sounds closer to [...
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the sound of "erre moscia" in Italian
In Italian we have the alveolar trill as a phoneme, but not all native speakers (me, for example) can do it: some people have what we call an "Erre Moscia" meaning we can't properly do the ...
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The dark l sound followed by a vowel sound during linking
the dark L in English is at the end of a word such as "girl", "pencil" or when it is followed by a consonant sound such as "child".
I'm curious what is happening with the ...
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How did latin "de post" become Romanian "după"?
Wouldn't the expected result be: "dopă"? I understand that the short "e" was assimilated by the long "o" from the next word, and then /o/ -> /ə/, but why o -> u ?
...
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What is the official/correct orthography for Alsatian / Elsässisch German?
As per the Wikipedia article on the Alsatian language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsatian_dialect#Orthography) the orthography
includes the latin letters A,B,C ... X,Y,Z and the following vowels ...
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Differences in realization of intrusive-r and linking-r?
Are there any good papers that have investigated this? I seemed to notice this with some speakers on television that their intrusive-r's seemed less pronounced than their linking-r's.
I did find a ...
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Does a synchronically reduced or diachronically changed trill /r/ often become an [ɾ] rather than [ʐ] and why?
In the phonology of a series of languages, /r/ exists as a trill, and is reduced into a flap in informal speeches or in a syllable-final position. Why is it happened to be a flap, not a fricative?
I ...
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Are there any recent studies on vowels of PRS?
Consonants and their phenomena are well studied for PRS (Puerto Rican Spanish). However, vowels and their phenomena are less well known. Known vowel phenomena in the dialect are unstressed/final vowel ...
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What (if anything) can be inferred about the way a vowel is articulated from the fact that it has well defined higher formants?
I've been experimenting with analysing vowels in Praat. Sometimes it shows a clear F4 (which seems to mean that F4 has a narrow bandwidth - I don't know whether amplitude comes into it as well) and ...
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The schwa in [meɪkəθ] for *maketh* in KJV English
This Wiki article seems to suggest that words like makes had lost their final syllable schwa in normal speech already by Chaucer's time (palmeres > palmers is the example they give). The rule, as ...
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Is there such a thing as an articulatory home base for a given language, and how could it be characterized?
I've been mulling over the idea that articulatory gestures should be looked as excursions from a home base that varies according to language and accent, and that defining sounds just in terms of the ...
user23078
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How many different vowels can be reliable annotated?
This question is similar to How many different vowels are there? but with a different twist: here I am not interested in the minimal difference between two vowels that can be heard, but in reliable ...
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Is there an instructive image where I can see a spectrum and a spectrogram, side-by-side?
I’m sometimes confused about representations of speech sounds.
Even if I know a spectrum is 2D and a spectrogram is 3D, and the axes are different, I often struggle to figure our what I’m looking at....
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Any name for this proposition? : Sounds reflects P.O.S. of the word
I am using natural language processing/speech recognition techniques so that I can provide better tools to learn English pronounciation.
While research on relevant topics, I found this fact:
...
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Similar sounds - phonemes, words and word-sequences
I'm looking for a way to identify words (single or in a sequence) that are audibly confusable (but not the same).
So I'm looking for what could be described as "near heterographs"?
If it helps, think ...
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Specifics about the impact of natural gender on pronunciation?
What is the difference in pronunciation between women and men when speaking a language, as opposed to the difference in the voice of men and women? The context for the question arises from my looking ...
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How can I distinguish different consonants in Praat/acoustic analysis?
How can I distinguish different consonants based on acoustic information/spectrographic analysis such as in Praat? Is there a list of acoustic cues for different consonants like there is for average ...
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Origin of vowel-h digraphs that English speakers use to represent phonemes
The majority of English speakers are not proficient in the International Phonetic alphabet or any other phonetic transcription system outside their own orthography. However, we often feel the need to ...
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L-epenthesis/allophony in unexplained circumstances in American English
I've been having trouble articulating this question, so I'm sorry if it's poorly worded.
I'm a teenage English speaker from Chicago. I've recently noticed a seemingly odd allophonic possibility in ...
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Speed listening
I have just heard that there are people out there (mostly blind people) using screen readers at overspeed, achieving speech rates twice as high as usual, and even higher.
What I want to know is: Are ...
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Is it more correct to use the minor and major foot groups in the IPA than commas and periods?
I transcribed some phrases from TV. This is casual American connected speech:
As you can notice I'm using the | and || symbols instead of the commas and periods. Also, I do not show the question mark,...
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Does aspiration propagate to the following vowel?
My native language is Korean, which is notorious for its three-way distinction (plain vs. tense vs. aspirated) of (non-nasal) stops. As such, I tried to analyze my own pronunciation.
Then I found that ...
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Are there generative theories of grammar with privative features outside of phonology?
By "generative grammar", I take the widest interpretation and do not mean "Chomsky's theory of syntax today", thus HPSG and LFG would be instances of GG(broad). Phonology has a ...
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Is there a standard(-ish) definition of affricate aspiration/VOT?
Is the frication of an affricate considered part of its aspiration? Or does the aspiration start at the end of the frication?
And does voice onset time (VOT) measure aspiration (as defined by the ...
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During second language acquisition, is it common for the speech organs to get tired by speaking the second language?
I am a non-native speaker of English (I'd rather not say what my native language is). I have noticed that my speech organs (tongue, lips, jaws and also the palate but I'm not so sure if it's the ...
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What is the origin of the pronunciation difference between 'replicate' (noun) and 'replicate' (verb)?
In English, the noun 'replicate' is pronounced with a schwa (ə) at the end while the verb is pronounced with the diphthong 'eɪ'. The same is true for the word 'duplicate'. Is there a more general ...
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Intuitive phonemic transcription systems for various languages
When a text or video about pronunciation is aimed at the average reader, it often doesn't use the IPA to represent sounds. Instead, it might talk about the "AW" sound as in law, the "AH&...
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Diphthongoids and diphthongs
In Russian linguistics, there's a term дифтонгоид (diphthongoid). For example, in textbook Современный русский литературный язык (Modern Standard Russian) by S.V. Knjazev and S.K. Pozharitskaya, it is ...
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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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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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How to analyse stops place of articulation?
Works which focus on differences in place of articulation of stops (like Sundara 2005, 2006) usually use spectral measurements (COG, skewness, SD, kurtosis) and relative burst intensity. It is not ...
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Is there any epenthesis in German by which "eins" sounds like "eints" and how frequent is the phenomenon?
The phenomenon works also on the cluster ls and thus it becomes [lts]. Both examples are alveolar sounds.
The epenthesis does not occur universally, but often works on "eins" anyway.
This does not ...
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Andrea Bocelli Aspiration
I have been listen to Andrea Bocelli's songs lately. A noticeable feature of his pronunciation while singing Spanish songs is that he constantly pronounces the plosives (especially at word-initial ...
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Do we have an Intonation "etymology"?
Recently I was thinking about a language I'm currently learning and its similarities with my own native language. While I assume grammar to change considerably depending on language it came to mind ...
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Fleece vowel - a long vowel or a diphthong?
I was reading Geoff Lindsey's blog and stumbled across an interesting matter. He says FLEECE vowel is actually a diphthong. Perhaps ij or ɪj. I can hear the diphthong [ɪj] in -ly, for example, and in ...
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Power in Center of Gravity
I am writing a Praat script to measure center of gravity in fricatives. I don't understand what the difference is in the power values. The manual says "Common values are 2, 1, or 2/3", but I don't ...
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Apico-alveolar consonants in Romagnol Italian and certain accents of Chinese: is that a thing?
Once upon a time were me and my brother, spending time at my grandma's in Romagna. We discovered she pronounced /ʃ/ almost like /s/, and even made fun of that by having her say «Schubert, Schumann e ...
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Where do I start if I want to a create a syllable like /ba/ or /pa/?
I want to create some syllable like /ba/, /pa/, /ta/, /da/, with either Praat or Klatt synthesis interface. But I was overwhelmed by the information I found on the Internet. I was wondering what I ...
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Does a good pronunciation improve one's ability to learn a language?
My father is a native Spanish speaker. He struggles with English pronunciation, and even though he has studied many English courses, he seems to be stuck. Once I talked with a phonetics teacher, with ...
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An analogy to understand phonetics and phonology
Is it accurate to make this statement?
An analogy of the difference between phonetics and phonology can be made with music. Phonetics would be the study of the vocals and sounds made by instruments ...
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Computational production of diphthongs
I am trying to generate vowels on MATLAB by using source-filter model. In case of monophthongs I'm using Rosenberg pulse as my source signal and then this source signal is convoluted with sounds ...
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Uvular Fricative Trill vs Uvular Fricative vs Preüvular Fricative
I'm having trouble differentiating the uvular trill, uvular, and preüvular fricatives.
While I understand that the preüvular variant is more fronted, it sounds to me like many acclaimed uvular ...
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