PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY COARTICULATION SOLUTION ...

PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
COARTICULATION
SOLUTION
Activities: To be completed in groups of two or three
1a. Carefully produce the following pairs of words and attend to the initial stop
consonant.
“key” “caw”
“kit” “caught”
“keep” “cook”
“kid” “could”
Describe your observations with regards to modifications from the expected velar
articulation. Can you explain this?
The velars before front vowels are fronted to palatal and the velars before back
vowels are retracted
b. Examine your production of the following pairs of words attending to the place of
articulation of the final consonant.
“pork” “peak”
“morgue” “league”
“walk” “week”
“look” “leak”
Again describe any modifications from the expected velar articulation..
The difference should not be as great in this position due to the fact that English is
an anticipatory language.
c. Is there greater difference between the pairs in (a) or (b)?
2 a. While holding your nose to prevent air escaping, say the pairs of words below
and examine the differences between the vowel phonemes in each pair.
“pan” “pat”
“pin” “pit”
“corn” “caught”
“been” “beat”
Describe the difference.

You should be able to feel that the vowels preceding nasals are nasalised (you can
feel the nasal resonance). You can also do this by putting your hands over your ears.
b. Repeat this exercise with the following words
“nat” “tan”
“knit” “tin”
“mark” “calm”
c. How do the two conditions differ?
Greater nasality for vowels before nasals than after nasals again due to anticipatory
coarticulation
3. Examine the articulatory processes involved in producing the final consonant
cluster in the following words.
“apt” “akt” “walked” “jabbed”
These words contain heterorganic consonant clusters which are produced such that
the closure of the first is not released until the second closure has already been
created. The two sounds stops are coarticulated in the literal sense where two
articulations are occurring at the same time.
4. Transcribe phonetically your production of the nasals in the following words
“invite” [M]
“infinity” [M]
“incorporate” [N]
“under” [n]
“canyon” [¯]
“onion” [¯]
Explain the variation – anticipatory coarticulation
5. Examine the corpus below from Mokilese an Austronesian language of the South
Pacific
[pi8san] "full of leaves" [uduk] "flesh"
[tu8pu88kta] "bought" [kaskas] "to throw"
[pu8ko] "basket" [poki] "to strike something"
[ki8sa] "we two" [pil] "water"
[su88pwo] "firewood" [apid] "outrigger support"
[kamq�ki8ti] "to move" [lud�uk] "to tackle"

Can you explain the voiceless variants of the vowels present in the data?
Close vowels become voiceless in this language when they occur between two
voiceless consonants. Note that [o] does not become voiceless in [poki] because it is
a half close vowel and not a close vowel.
6. The following is data from Castilian Spanish which has three nasal phonemes
/m, n, �/
[�a�fo�a] "amphora"
[en���ia] "gum"
[�an��t�es] "before"
[�an�t�a] "wide"
[�ba�ko] "bench"
[e���uto] "dry"
[n�] is interdental, [n��] is dental
Explain the alternation of the nasals.
This is a simple case of anticipatory coarticulation
7. Hausa is described as a language with two nasal phonemes /n/ and /m/. How do
you explain the presence of the following words in the language.
[s��k’o] "baldness"
[s��ho��] "a type of basket"
[k��wa] "potash"
[ŋ] is an allophone that occurs before back consonants. In these words the velar,
glottal and labial-velar.
8. Examine the lip gestures that occur in the following words in English.
“sweep” “seep”
“soon” “six”
“strewn” “seven”
“swoop” “super”
“switch” “soothing”
Can you explain why some words have lip rounding throughout and others do not?
In “sweep, switch, soothing” lip rounding occurs as a result of the labial-velar /w/ and
the rounded /u/ but cannot continue because rounding is inconsistent with the lip
specification for [i] and [�].

“seep, six, seven” have no lip rounding at all.
“soon, strewn, swoop” have lip rounding throughout as there are no sounds requiring
unrounding.
9. In many languages consonant place of articulation is affected by the place
characteristics of following vowels such that back vowels often condition back
varieties of consonants and front vowels condition more fronted varieties. There are
however constraints on the degree to which such conditioning occurs in language.
Examine the voiceless stop phoneme inventory of Yanyuwa below and explain why
consonant to vowel coarticulation is greatly reduced in this language. The symbol for
the apical post alveolar is a dot under the [t]. This is not the same as retroflex which
is a sub-apical palatal.
bilabial laminal apical laminal palatal velar
dental post alveolar post alveolar
[p] [t�] [t�] [t�] [c] [k]
This language has a very complex consonant inventory which requires careful place
specification inhibiting coarticulation.