Finegan says that consonants can be produced by obstructing air flow as it passes from the lungs through the vocal tract and out the nose or mouth. This differs from vowels which "are produced by positioning the tongue and mouth to form differently shaped passages."
there are three types of consonants. They are fricatives, stops, and affricates.
- fricatives: air is forced through to form a continuous sound
- stops: air passage is blocked then released
- affricates: is formed by combining a stop and fricative (judge)
These three form a group called obstruents.
My personal experience with this chapter besides definitions was that it is extremely difficult for me to say the words and be able to recognize where my tongue is going whether i am stopping my breath. I think memorizing the words and definitions will help me with this task as I become more familiar with them.
English consonants are described in three properties
- voicing: vocal cord vibration or not
- place of articulation: where airstream is obstructed
- manner of articulation: way airstream is obstructed
Nice summary! I've also not taken a phonetics course and found the chapters to be difficult to understand. I teach phonics to my students but not even close to the depth of this. I guess my original assumptions of students learning the alphabet and sounds, then making words from that isn't totally off course according to the word recognition theory. I also understood that to produce different sounds, your tongue and mouth needed to be in a certain places, but its interesting how the English language and others have such differences in how words are produced, the sounds that they make and the way they are said.
ReplyDeleteSince English is your mother tongue you do not need to recognize where your tongue is going and how you are stopping your breath while pronuncing a sound in English. But if you want to know about all those stuff the website could be very useful. http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/english/frameset.html
ReplyDeleteI love that Bekir can give us the non native English speaker's perspective. Like he said, we don't think about these things at all. Brian, I'm sure you think about tongue, teeth, glottis, etc. when speaking German and or helping others pronounce German words. I always found the umlauts the hardest to get high school students to tackle and conquer.
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