Abstract
This chapter builds awareness of coordinated articulatory habits and their acoustic realizations when vowels and consonants are combined into simple English words. English allophones are described as contextual/positional variants and highlighted as an area influencing the speech of non-native speakers. Allophonic variation covered in this chapter exemplifies further the interplay between the physical and mental aspects of speech in the phonetics-phonology system underlying speech. Skill building includes the annotation functionality in Praat and narrow transcription using IPA diacritics for most salient English allophones.
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Notes
- 1.
For some speakers or in fast speech, ‘pandemonium’ might also be four syllables.
- 2.
Another factor that plays the role is that native English words starting with <sb> do not occur. Hence, even though the <p> in ‘spy’ is acoustically similar to <b> in ‘bye’, we still identify it as /p/ of ‘spy’.
- 3.
For example, many non-native speakers after being informed about aspiration produce it as if they were ‘adding a [h]’ after the stop. The problem is that this type of added [h] results from a different coordination of the stricture formation and vocal cord activity. Therefore it is important to become aware that aspiration is just a natural consequence of a particular coordination of articulatory gestures.
- 4.
For some speakers, mainly American English but also some Brits, [j] in words like ‘Sue’ would not be present and it would also not be present in words like ‘tune’, ‘during’, ‘news’, ‘presume’, or ‘lukewarm’. But in words like ‘few’, ‘pew’, ‘cue’ or ‘argue’ [j] would follow the consonant. This is another mental pattern (= habit) that groups the natural class of the alveolar consonants to contrast with other consonants in that the former are not followed by [j] when [uː] follows while the latter always are.
- 5.
For phonetic studies, see for example a recent paper by Turton (2017) that reviews relevant literature and presents interesting new data. Regarding dialectal variation, Collins and Mees (2013) for example mention that many Welsh or Irish speakers only use clear [l] while many Scottish or American speakers only use dark [ɫ].
References
Collins, Beverley, and Inger M. Mees. 2013. Practical phonetics and phonology: A resource book for students. Abingdon: Routledge.
Turton, Danielle. 2017. Categorical or gradient? An ultrasound investigation of /l/-darkening and vocalization in varieties of English. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 8 (1): 13. https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.35.
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7.1 Electronic Supplementary Material
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Beňuš, Š. (2021). Allophonic Variation in English. In: Investigating Spoken English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54349-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54349-5_7
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