Experimental Phonetics

Phonetics is the scientific study of speech sounds. Traditionally, three domains of phonetics are distinguished:

o Articulatory phonetics studies how speech sounds are produced by a speaker.

o Auditory phonetics studies how speech sounds are perceived by a listener.

o Acoustic phonetics studies the properties of the sound waves that are associated with speech sounds.

o Acoustic phonetics has several potential benefits for linguistic fieldwork. Acoustic analysis may help improve the accuracy of phonetic transcriptions. Some people find certain phonetic distinctions difficult to hear with their bare ears. Examples of such distinctions are

relative pitch height (high, mid, low),

the direction of pitch movements (rising or falling),

relative length (duration) of vowels and consonants,

differences in vowel quality,

presence VS absence of aspiration

voice quality distinctions (modal voice, breathy voice, creaky voice).

Information gleaned from

o speech wave graphs,

o spectrograms,

o fundamental frequency graphs (or pitch graphs), and other representations of the acoustic signal,

can supplement the bare-ears (or auditory) analysis and in this way increase the accuracy and precision of the phonetic description of the sounds.

Second benefit of the use of acoustic instruments is that one can take quantitative measurements, the results of which can then be used for further statistical analysis.

Sound waves are small, rapid vibrations of air that start at one location and spread throughout a body of air. These vibrations can be captured by a microphone and stored on different media such as a magnetic tape or a computer disk. They can also be analyzed, displayed, and measured in various ways, for instance, by means of

o electroglottography,

o radiography (or X-ray analysis),

o photoglottography,

o laryngoscopy,.

o high-speed photography,

o ultrasound,

o oscillography,

o intonography,

o spectrography

o Electroglottography (EGG) is a technique used to register laryngeal behaviour indirectly by a measuring the change in electrical impedance across the throat during speaking. The method was first developed by Fabre (1957)

o Radiography (or X-ray analysis) is the taking of X-ray photographs of the vocal tract to register the position of different speech organs while this or that sound is pronounced

o Oscillographic, intonographic and spectrographic types of speech analysis are now carried out by means of modern multifunctional software. Although in the past the phoneticians used clumsy equipment to carry out such analysis.

Modern Internet technologies gave access not only to the modern software for the spontaneous speech analysis, but also to the speech analysis tutorials, on-line phonetics courses, pronouncing dictionaries, speech corpuses etc. Most foreign researches in the sphere of oral speech are aimed at automated recognition and synthesis of speech.

Modern multifunctional computer programs / software

o Speech Analyser,

o WaveSurfer,

o Sound Forge,

o Sound Analyser,

o WavеLab,

o Transcriber,

o CoolEditPro,

o PRAAT etc.

o Software help linguists analyze harmonic and spectral structure of sounds, pitch, duration, intensity etc.

o Hypertext training is the best and widely spread in the nearest future.’

o http:// www.research.att.com/

o http:// www.phonetic.uni.muenchen.de/AP/Home.html

o http://www.music.mcgill.cf/auditory/Auditory.html

o http://ophale.icp.grenet.fr./

Дата добавления: 2015-10-23