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In phonetics and phonology, we refer to the place of articulation, manner of articulation and voicing when describing consonant production. In this article, we'll look at:The definition of 'place of articulation'The different places of articulationA chart of the different places of articulationDifferent types of consonantsVoicing refers to if a consonant sound is voiced or voiceless (like whispering).Manner of articulation refers to the way…
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Jetzt kostenlos anmeldenIn phonetics and phonology, we refer to the place of articulation, manner of articulation and voicing when describing consonant production.
In this article, we'll look at:
Voicing refers to if a consonant sound is voiced or voiceless (like whispering).
Manner of articulation refers to the way in which articulators release the airflow to create a consonant sound.
The place of articulation refers to where the articulators (tongue, teeth, lips or glottis) make contact in the vocal tract to create consonant sounds. Let's look at the process of consonant production to see where the place of articulation fits in.
The process of consonant production is:
The gap between the vocal cords is called the glottis and can be either closed (so no air passes through), partially open (making the vocal folds vibrate to make “voiced sounds”) or open (the airflow passes through with no vibration to make “Voiceless sounds”).
Speech sounds are separated according to their place of articulation and manner of articulation. There are eight places of articulation:
Take a look at the chart below for the eight different places of articulation.
Fig. 1 - There are eight different places of articulation.
Let's now look in more detail at how we group these consonants in places of articulation:
Coronal consonants are speech sounds made with the most flexible part of the mouth: the tongue. Coronal consonants can be bilabial, dental, labiodental, alveolar and post-alveolar.
There are four further sub-categories:
In English, the coronal consonants are / l, s, z, n, d, t /. It is good to be aware of coronal consonants, especially if you are learning a new language because it helps to know which part of the tongue to use.
Dorsal consonants are speech sounds created with the tongue, but they use the body of the tongue rather than the tip or the blade. Dorsal consonants include palatal and velar consonants.
Because of the flexibility of the tongue's dorsum (its back), we can reach a wide area in the roof of the mouth: from the hard palate (where we form the palatal consonants) to the velum (where we form the velar consonants).
In we have four types of dorsal consonants in English:
Labial consonants are speech sounds created when one or both lips interact as active articulators. As we have seen before, labial consonant divide in bilabial and labio-dental.
There are five ways of making labials in English:
We refer to the place of articulation where the articulators in the vocal tract make contact (or not) to create the sound of the consonant.
We have eight categories in the places of articulation: bilabial, labio-dental, dental, alveolar, velar, post-alveolar, glottal, and palatal.
A bilabial consonant sound is created by the lips making contact with each other.
The glottis consonant is the sound created by the airflow cutting in the vocal cords.
A velar consonant sound is created by the tongue making contact with the soft palate.
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