SAR SH 221 Lecture 3: Lecture 3
14 Feb 2019
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Document Summary
They appear when the vocal tract are open. Where the formants are in frequency tell us which vowel we are hearing. Vowels come when the vocal tract is not constricted. Formants are areas of sound intensity of the spectrum. We open and close our jaw, move our tongue to articulate. How many features are needed to classify vowels? front and back, high and low, roundness, tense or lax (4 in total). Phonological feature: a rule about the language. Tense and lax is phonological because it is not about the acoustic or articulation of the vowels, it is where you nd the vowels in syllables. Vowels that are lax cannot exist in open syllables. We cannot have a word that nishes with a lax. Tense vowels can be unchecked; that is, they can occur at the end of a word. Speech sounds ( phonemes or segments ) are contrastive, discrete and combinatorial.
