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English Consonants

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Investigating Spoken English

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Abstract

In the chapter Benus focuses on the contrastive characteristics of English consonants balancing the introspective activities and articulatory descriptions with visualizations of acoustics afforded by Praat. The discussion is framed around notions such as the stricture, voicing and the place and manner of consonant articulation. This chapter continues expanding on the command of Praat from previous two chapters by introducing new functionalities such as formant transition visualization or measuring the centre of gravity for fricatives. The major systematic sound-spelling correspondences in English consonants are briefly reviewed in the end.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Nasal consonants that are voiceless (and contrast with the voiced ones or voiceless ones of various places or articulation) are extremely rare among the languages of the world due to their low perceptual discriminating potential.

  2. 2.

    I first heard about this discovery activity from A. Underhill at the seminar devoted to his book (Underhill 2005).

  3. 3.

    I thank S. Boyce and M. Tiede for permission to use this image.

References

  • Tiede, Mark K., Susanne E. Boyce, Christy K. Holland, and K. Ann Choe. 2004. A new taxonomy of American English /r/ using MRI and ultrasound. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 115: 2633–2634.

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  • Underhill, Adrian. 2005. Sound foundations. Oxford: Macmillan.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Nitra, Slovakia

    Štefan Beňuš

  2. Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia

    Štefan Beňuš

Authors
  1. Štefan Beňuš
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Štefan Beňuš .

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Cite this chapter

Beňuš, Š. (2021). English Consonants. In: Investigating Spoken English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54349-5_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54349-5_6

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-54348-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-54349-5

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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