Andizhan state institute of foreign languages faculty of english and literature department of english and literature

The aim of this course paper is to investigate a set of acoustic features and classification methods for the classification of the groups of fricative consonants differing in place of articulation. The research consists of
1.The acoustic features of fricatives
2.Classification of fricatives in English
3.Difficulties in pronouncing fricative sounds
The object is the process of pronouncing and classifing fricatives in English
Fields of application: The present work might find a good approaches of studying fricative sounds
Methods of the research is investigate scientific literature,observation,the main methods for fricative consonants by using various methods.
Materials of the research for given research utilized a lot of books,articles by methodology which written in bibliography.
Structure of the research:
Introduction
Main body
Conclusion
Bibliography


1. THE ACOUSTIC FEATURES OF FRICATIVES IN ENGLISH
Phonology is concerned with how sounds interact with one another in a language. Phonetics is a descriptive tool used to study the phonological aspects of a language. Phonetics is concerned with language sounds, whereas phonology is concerned with language sound systems. (Haman and Schimtz, 2005:3)[3]
According to Collins and Mees (2013:38), the organs of speech are divided into three groups, which are shown here from top to bottom: head (articulatory system), throat (phonatory system), and chest (respiratory system). It is impossible to examine the anatomy of the respiratory system and difficult to examine the anatomy of the phonatory system. However, the majority of the articulatory system is easily visible.
On the way out, the air flow can be more or less obstructed, producing a consonant, or it can simply be modified, producing a vowel. Consonants are frequently labeled as VPM. VPM stands for Voicing, Place, and Manner. When they are produced, the places of articulation where there is the most obstruction in the mouth. Bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, palatoalveolar, palatal, velar, and glottal are the various types.
The type of articulation is determined by the type of obstruction encountered by the air after it passes through the vocal folds. It may encounter a complete closure (plosives), an almost complete closure (fricatives), or a smaller degree of closure (approximants), or the air may escape in more unusual ways, such as around the sides of the tongue (laterals) or through the nasal cavity (nasals).
They must be able to say words, phrases, or sentences as correctly as native speakers when learning English pronunciation. It is very important for a student because it allows them to hear and correct mistakes they made, as well as remember how to pronounce that word correctly.
The consonant, which is typical of fricatives, will allow air to flow out through the small passage. When the sound is pronounced, it sounds like a hissing sound, and we can feel the pushed air by putting our hand in front of our mouth. The fricatives sound is made up of the sounds [f], [v], [], [], [s], [z],[],[], and [h]. When they pronounce / in the word think, they pronounce /tink/, in the word she, they pronounce /si/, and in the word they, they pronounce /deI/. These are understood by looking at their different mother tongue backgrounds. They only know /t, d, s/ in Indonesian consonants. On the contrary, some fricatives in English consonants differ from those in Indonesian, such as: / ∫ /, /ð/ in think, she, and they.
Pronunciation is the production of significant sound used by a particula language as part of the code of the language, and used to achieve meaning in context. Pronunciation is probably one of the hardest speaking skills in English to learn because learning pronunciation takes much time and effort to improve understanding how to pronounce correctly. When speaking English, the speakers and the listeners are having a mutual relationship of communication. They affect each other by means that in order that the listeners can grasp the message of what is said, the speakers have to speak with a correct pronunciation by means the English sounds are pronounced correctly. Otherwise, the listeners will undergo misunderstanding caused by the incorrect pronunciation. This is because speech sounds in a language are distinctive units that different sounds can lead to different meanings (Yule, 2010).[4]
Crystal (2008: 102) defines consonant in terms of both phonetics and phonology. Phonetically, it is a sound coming from closure or narrowing in the vocal tract therefore the airflow is either completely blocked or restricted that audible friction is produce. Humans employ speech organs in producing consonants that the term ‘articulation’ is used to most to address consonant production (Daniel et al., 2014). Phonologically, consonants are those units which function at the margins of syllables, either singly or in clusters. There are 24 consonants:
[p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g], [l], [t∫], [ʤ], [m], [n], [ŋ], [f], [v], [θ], [ð], [s], [z], [∫], [з], [r], [h], [w], and [j]. Discussing about consonant classification will lead to three things: voicing, place of articulation and manner of articulation.Acoustic phonetics is the study of the acoustic characteristics of speech, including an analysis and description of speech in terms of its physical properties, such as frequency, intensity, and duration. Acoustic phonetics is an instrumental science that depends on ways to store, replicate, visualize, and analyze the speech signal. Acoustic phonetics is also a cumulative science in which older research continues to be influential. While the early work of researchers, such as Rousselot 1897–1908 and Scripture 1906 , provided a first glimpse at the complexity of the speech signal, this research is not widely cited nowadays. In contrast, a number of seminal contributions on vocal tract acoustics and research based on the sound spectrograph remain influential. Among these, Chiba and Kajiyama 1958 introduces the acoustic theory of vowel production, which was further developed in Fant 1960, a seminal dissertation on the acoustic theory of speech production. Potter, et al. 1947 provides the first systematic overview of the acoustic characteristics of English vowels and consonants as illustrated by spectrograms. Joos 1948 still is a very accessible general introduction to acoustic phonetics. Jakobson, et al. 1952 uses new insights from speech processing to define distinctive features in acoustic rather than articulatory terms. Finally, Stevens 1998 is currently the most comprehensive source for the acoustics of vowels and consonants. The work is based on nearly fifty years of research by one of the most important figures in speech science.
Phonetics and phonology are the branches of linguistics that deals with speech sounds. Something that is often misunderstood is the difference between phonetics and phonology. In short:
-Phonetics is the study of how speech sounds are made and perceived.
-Phonology is about sound systems - how speech sounds are put together and how they are stored in the mind.
There are roughly 44 - speech sounds but this depends on an individual's accent. It's important to stress the difference between written and spoken language here - the written system of English has 26 letters (or graphemes); the spoken system of English has 44 speech sounds (which we can call phonemes). Because there is a 'mismatch' between the number of graphemes and phonemes, meaning that we can say that English is a non-phonetic language. The way that graphemes and phonemes relate to each other is called the grapheme-phoneme correspondence system.There are various ways of categorising speech sounds. At a basic level, we can seperate sounds into vowels and consonants. Vowels are 'open' sounds, meaning there is no constriction or obstructions present in their articulation - just open your mouth and say 'ahhh'! Consonants are formed by various narrowings or constrictions in the vocal tract, as different vocal articulators (teeth, lips, tongue, etc.) combine. We will see that there are further ways of categorising and labelling sounds.In order to write down speech sounds we use the international phonetic alphabet for this. This is a system for writing down all the known sounds of the world's languages. Each sound has a different written symbol - for example, the phonetic alphabet symbol for the vowel sound in cat is /æ/.Inidividual speech sounds are called phonemes. A single phoneme may be represented in writing by one, two, three or four letters. To demonstrate, let's see how cat, catch and caught are transcribed.
-The word cat has three letters and three phonemes: /kæt/
-The word catch has five letters and three phonemes: /kætʃ/
-The word caught has six letters and three phonemes: /kɔ:t/
Vowels
Vowels are made by pushing air up from the lungs and allowing it to pass through the vocal tract without obstruction. They are normally voiced, that is, their production involves vibration of the vocal folds (this contrasts with unvoiced, where there is no vibaration of the vocal folds). The easiest way to know if a sound is voiced is to place your fingers and thumb on your throat and produce a sound. If you feel the throat vibrating or 'buzzing', then it is a voiced sound. Try it now with a range of vowels. Vowels can sub-grouped according to their length - they can be short or long.
Short vowels
There are seven short vowels in English:
[ɪ] as in quick and bit
[e] as in friend and said
[æ] as in spat and mat
[ʌ] as in drunk and tough
[ɒ] as in spot and wasp
[ʊ] as in put and full
[ə] as in water and banana
Long vowels
There are five long vowels in English:
[i:] as in feet and speak
[u:] as in moon and true
[ɜ:] as in heard and third
[ɔ:] as in taught and port
[ɑ:] as in bar and father
Diphthongs
Diphthongs are 'gliding vowels', where one vowel sound glides into an other one, as a result of the lips or tongue moving. A diphthong is a change in vowel quality, whose sound changes within the same syllable.
There are eight diphthongs in English:
[eɪ] as in pray and sleigh
[ɔɪ] as in joy and boy
[aɪ] as in fry and high
[aʊ] as in cow and now
[əʊ] as in go and blow
[ɛə] as in care and flair
[ɪə] as in hear and pier
[ʊə] as in pure and tour
Beware that a diphthong is not just a combination of two vowels. For example, in the two-syllable word seeing, /i:/ becomes /ɪ/ but it is not a diphthong because /i:/ and /ɪ/ are not in the same syllable.
Consonants
Consonants are produced by pushing air up from the lungs and out through the mouth and/or nose. Airflow is disrupted by obstructions made by various combinations of vocal articulator movements, so that audible friction is produced.
They are described in terms of (1) voicing, (2) place of articulation and (3) manner of articulation.
Voicing
Voicing refers to the presence or absence of vocal vibration during speech sound production. In a voiced sound, there is vocal fold vibration and an audible 'buzzing' sound. In an unvoiced sound, there is no vocal fold vibration.
Compare the first consonant in thimble (represented by /θ/ with the first sound in this (represented by /ð/). Again, try placing your finger and thumb on your throat whilst producing the sound. In thimble the consonant /θ/ is unvoiced because there is an absence of vocal fold vibration. In this, the consonant /ð/ is voiced because there is a presence of vocal fold vibration.
Place of articulation
The place of articulation is the physical location in the vocal tract that a phoneme is produced in, and the kinds of articulatory movements that are involved in producing a sound.
-Bilabial consonants are produced at the lips (e.g. /b/).
-Labio-dental consonants are produced with the lower lip and the upper teeth (e.g. /f/).
-Dental consonants are produced when the tongue is placed between the teeth (e.g. /θ/, /ð/).
-Alveolar consonants are produced with the tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge (the hard, bony ridge behind the teeth) (e.g. /s/).
-Post-alveolar sounds are produced with the tip of the tongue and the roof of the mouth (specifically, the area in between the alveolar ridge and the soft palate). (e.g. /ʃ/, /ʒ/).
-Palatal sounds are produced between the tongue and the hard palate (e.g. /j/).
-Velar sounds are produced between the back of the tongue and the velum (e.g. /k/, /g/).
So far we have said that consonants can be defined by (1) their voicing, and (2) their place of articulation. Our final level of classification is to do with the manner or process of articulation. This is related to the degree of closure (complete closure → close approximation → open approximation).
Plosives involve a complete closure, where the vocal articulators fully meet and air flow is stopped. This creates the 'explosion' of sound when the closure is released, hence the name 'plosive'. The plosive sounds in English are: /p b t d k g/.
Fricatives involve a close approximation, where the vocal articulators do not fully meet and air flow is forced through a narrow passage. This creates the friction sound, hence the name 'fricative'. The fricative sounds in English are: /f v s z θ ð ʃ ʒ/.
Approximants involve an open approximation, where the vocal articulators are still close but not enough to create friction. The approximant sounds in English are: /j r w/.
Nasal sounds are produced by air coming out through the nose and mouth. The nasal sounds in English are /m n ŋ/.