02 Phonetics Free Online FlashCards

What does phonetics study?

Phonetics studies speech sounds as physical events: how they are produced, travel through the air, and are perceived.

What are the three perspectives in phonetics?

Articulatory phonetics studies production, acoustic phonetics studies the sound signal, and auditory phonetics studies hearing and perception.

What distinguishes voiced from voiceless sounds?

A sound is voiced when the vocal folds vibrate and voiceless when they do not. For example, [z] is voiced and [s] is voiceless.

What is coarticulation?

Coarticulation is the overlap of speech movements: a speaker may begin preparing one sound while still producing the preceding sound.

Which three properties commonly describe consonants?

Consonants are described by voicing, place of articulation (where airflow is narrowed or blocked), and manner of articulation (how airflow is shaped or restricted).

How is [p] classified articulatorily?

[p] is a voiceless bilabial stop: both lips close to block airflow briefly, then release it.

Which features are used to describe vowels?

Vowels are produced with a relatively open vocal tract and are described mainly by tongue height, tongue backness, and lip rounding.

What does a waveform show, and what does a spectrogram show?

A waveform shows changes in amplitude over time; a spectrogram shows how energy at different frequencies changes over time.

What is fundamental frequency (F0) in voiced speech?

For voiced sounds, fundamental frequency (F0) is the rate of vocal-fold vibration and is an important cue to perceived pitch.

How do F1 and F2 relate to vowel quality?

Formants are resonant frequency regions shaped by the vocal tract. F1 generally rises as tongue position gets lower; F2 generally tends to be higher for front than back vowels.

How does the source–filter model explain voiced speech?

In the source–filter model, vocal-fold vibration supplies the acoustic source, and the vocal tract filters it by strengthening some frequency regions and weakening others.

Why is speech perception more than a passive copy of the signal?

Listeners combine acoustic cues to identify sounds; neighboring sounds, speaking rate, voice, and context can influence those cues. Expectations and linguistic context can help resolve unclear speech.