Definition Phonetics vs phonology The phoneme theory – Distinctiveness in speech sounds – Phoneme and allophone – Minimal pairs – Principles in deciding on phonemes

Here the vowels of American English are plotted according to the point of primary obstruction by the tongue in the articulation of the sound. \Low\ refers not only to the position of the tongue but the jaw as well

In the production of a sound, if the air, onceout of the glottis, is allowed to pass freelythrough the resonators, the sound is a vowel

In addition to their normal names, many of the parts of the vocal tract have fancy names derived from Latin and Greek. The adjectives we use to describe sounds made with each part are usually based on the Latin/Greek name

1. Definition of tone Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords. 声调是由于声带振动的速率的不同而引起的音高变化

Part Two Sounds in Connected Speech 1. Strong and Weak Forms 2. Assimilation and elision 3. Liaison 4. Length of a sound 5. Word stress 6. Sentence stress 7. Rhythm 8. Sense groups and Pause

The importance of phonetic study 1) Phonetics is the science of speech sounds. It deals with the sound system of a language. A language consists of three important elements, namely, speech sounds, vocabulary and grammar. Speech

It should first be pointed out that there are two kinds of stress: word stress and sentence stress. The former is concerned with the stressing of individual words of two or more syllables when they are pronounced in isolation

This section is concerned with one of the most remarkable features of English pronunciation. Many common English words have two or more pronunciations in speech, depending on their positions in a sentence----a strong form and one or more weak forms