Phonetics

Manners of articulation

We generally classify our sounds by their manners of articulation— basically how we actually use those articulators. In general, most sounds are egressive, meaning we push air out of lungs to make them, but there are a few examples of ingressive sounds, where we take air into the lungs. 

There are glottal stops, where we abruptly bring our vocal folds together and hold them tightly together, as in when you say uh oh! There are voiced sounds, where we vibrate our vocal folds, like the z in zoo. And then there are voiceless sounds, where we don't vibrate our vocal folds, as in the s in Sam. 

But linguists are very finnicky with classifications. So, there's tons of manners of articulations. Here's a few that we definetly use in English. 

Suprasegmentals

Phones have suprasegmental or prosodic properties, like pitch, loudness, and length.

Pitch allows us to place it on a scale from high to low, and is especially noticeable in sonorous sounds like vowels, glides, liquids, and nasals.

The control of pitch results in tone and intonation.

A language is said to have tone when differences in word meaning are signaled by differences in pitch.

When one says “A car?” with a raising pitch, the word “car” refers to the same thing as when it’s pronounced without that raised pitch; this is intonation. In contrast, a speaker of Mandarin can say entirely different words by changing the pitch; this is tone. For instance: [mà] with a falling pitch means something entirely different than [má] with a rising pitch.

The amount and classification of tone varies from language to language.

• But.. intonation signals meaning too, right?
  
  • Yes! It does, but it does not change the meaning of a word, rather just signals something different.
    
  • For instance, if I raise my pitch when saying a phrase, it signals that the phrase might be incomplete— teachers and professors do this all the time when they want students to finish their sentences.
    

Also, it’s worth noting that some languages make use of both intonation and tone at the same time.

Sometimes, vowels are perceived as more prominent than others, like how in “banana” the second syllable is more prominent than the other two. Stress covers the combined effects of pitch, loudness and length, which gives us this perceived prominence.

The wavelength is the distance between a peaks of waves. It's the horizontal length of one cycle of the wave.

The period is the time it take sto complete one cycle. 

The frequency is the number of cycles that pass a set point in a second, usually measured in Hertz (Hz). It's connected to pitch, with higher frequency meaning higher pitch and lower frequency meaning lower pitch. 

The amplitude is represented by the height of the waves. Louder sounds have louder amplitudes, and vice versa. It's usally measured in decibels (dB), and the softest sound we can hear is the zero point. We normally speak at 60 dB. 

Speech perception

Speech perception deserves an article of it's own, as it's study is deep and storied. It's the process by which sounds are heard, interpreted and understood and plays closely with phonetics and phonology, as well as cognitive science as a whole. It has applications in computer recognition of speech, like in Siri or even Google Translate. 

The sound of speech contains acoustic cues that scientists use to differentiate speech sounds belonging to different phonetic categories. One example would be voice onset time, which can signal the difference between voiced and voiceless stops like "b" and "p." 

This process is at an intersection of many discplines and is wonderful for demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of linguistics. In order to understand speech perception, one must draw from cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, and occasionally even computer science.

Sources and resources