SPPA 403 Speech Science

UNIT 3 OUTLINE: ARTICULATION

I. THE VOCAL TRACT

a. Identify the cavities of the vocal tract

b. Identify the major boundaries of each cavity (e.g. hard palate, lips, teeth etc)

c. Describe the valve and tube analogy of the vocal tract

d. Draw a simplified model of vocal tract based on valves and tubes

II. VOWEL CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

a. Know the vowel quadrilateral and be able to fill it in for all vowels

b. Identify the four corner vowels and describe their articulatory configuration

III. SOURCE FILTER THEORY FOR UNDERSTANDING VOWELS

a. Describe how and why we might represent the vocal tract as tubes

b. Outline source-filter theory and how it relates to speech production

c. Distinguish between source spectrum, transfer function and output spectrum

d. Describe how the area function of a tube (vocal tract) is determined

e. Outline the acoustic characteristics of a uniform tube, closed at one end, including calculating formant frequencies for tube with known dimensions

f. Distinguish between and describe relation between area function and transfer function

g. Describe the relation between gender and age and formant frequencies

IV. THE SPECTROGRAM

a. Describe how the amplitude spectrum and the spectrogram are related

b. Identify the axis units of the spectrogram

c. Provide some advantages of the spectrogram over the amplitude spectrum

d. Distinguish between a wide band and narrow band spectrogram and outline the different information each provides

e. Distinguish between a harmonic and a formant

V. THE VOWELS

a. Describe the basic shape of the area function for the four corner vowels

b. Outline our basic tongue and lip rules for predicting formant shifts from the neutral position

c. Provide typical formant values (F1 and F2) only for the four corner vowels

d. Compare the shape of the vowel quadrilateral and the F1-F2 plot

e. Provide an explanation for why we treat women’s, men’s and children’s vowels as equivalent even though absolute values of formants differ a lot

f. Draw stylized spectrograms for the four corner vowels

VI. DIPHTHONGS, GLIDES AND LIQUIDS

a. distinguish between vowels and diphthongs in articulatory and acoustic terms

b. distinguish between diphthongs, glides and liquids in articulatory and acoustic terms

c. understand the articulatory and acoustic features of /w/ and /j/

d. understand the articulatory and acoustic features of /l/ and /r/

e. draw stylized spectrograms for diphthongs, glides and liquids