1 / 21

SPEECH ARTICULATION 3 . Diphthongs

SPEECH ARTICULATION 3 . Diphthongs. David Brett. While the position of the tongue is more or less stable for a pure vowel…. … a diphthong is characterised by a graceful movement from one point to another, for this reason they are also sometimes known as glides.

hayes
Download Presentation

SPEECH ARTICULATION 3 . Diphthongs

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. SPEECH ARTICULATION 3. Diphthongs David Brett

  2. While the position of the tongue is more or less stable for a pure vowel…

  3. … a diphthong is characterised by a graceful movement from one point to another, for this reason they are also sometimes known as glides.

  4. This is also visible on a spectrogram: this is the pure vowel /a/…

  5. …and this is the diphthong /aI/. Notice how the formants (the dark bands) seperate towards the end.

  6. English diphthongs may cause Italian speakers difficulty for two main reasons: • Italian has four diphthongs (I think!) while English has eight. All the Italian diphthongs have equivalents in English which are not the same but which are reasonably similar • Nowhere is the English spelling system more bizarre than in its representation of diphthongs

  7. If one has a clear idea of where pure vowels are articulated on the quadrilateral then interpreting the diphthong symbols is not difficult.

  8. Technically, English diphthongs are divided into two groups: • Closing diphthongs – which tend to move from an open to a close position, these roughly correspond to Italian sounds • Centring diphthongs – which tend towards a central position ( / @/ )

  9. First we will look at the closing group…

  10. … the ‘pay’, ‘ made’, ‘maid’, ‘reign’, ‘obey’, sound:

  11. Then we have the ‘I’, ‘my’, ‘tie’, ‘sigh’, ‘either’, ‘eye’, ‘Thai’, sound:

  12. Then there is ‘boy’, ‘choice’:

  13. Then ‘down’, ‘loud’:

  14. To end the closing group, the most common diphthong in English, that of ‘no’, ‘know’,‘bone’, ‘foam’, ‘sew’, ‘though’, ‘don’t’, ‘foe’, ‘crow’:

  15. To start with the centring group, we have the most common, that of ‘clear’, ‘deer’, ‘here’, ‘wier’:

  16. Then ‘air’, ‘where’, wear’, ‘care’, ‘heir’:

  17. Finally, there is a diphthong which is quite rare and is often realised as /O:/ - ‘tour’, ‘poor’:

  18. Similar to pure vowels, the acoustic qualities (formants 1 and 2) of diphthongs may be plotted on a graph similar to the quadrilateral…

  19. … this is an elaborated plot of inverted values of F1 against F2 of the diphthong /aI/.

  20. One or two final considerations: • Although the symbols indicating pure vowels and the starting and closing points of diphthongs are often the same they do not necessarily correspond to the same points • Lip rounding is another variable, generally associated with back vowels

  21. Finally: • Diphthongs are the element in a language which are most liable to change. The majority of the characteristics of a given accent are usually to be found in this area, so understanding of the underlying mechanics is vital if one wants to understand accents and accent change.

More Related