Experimental phonetics

Voiceless refers to the fact that the vocal folds are not
vibrating (the voicing dimension), labiodental to contact between the upper teeth and the lower lip (the place of articulation dimension), and fricative to the fact that the constriction between the lips and the teeth is sufficiently narrow for the rasping sound to be produced when air flows between them, but does not cut off the airstream entirely (the manner of articulation dimension).

Acquiring skill in impressionistic phonetics is, in many ways, like studying the pronunciation of a new language. For example, a native speaker of English who sets out to learn French must master the vowel sound which occurs in words such as lune 'moon' or tu 'you (familiar)', and which is pronounced rather like the vowel of English see but with closely rounded lips. There are three aspects to this mastery: (1) learning to pronounce the vowel oneself (2) learning to recognise the vowel when it is pronounced by native speakers of French and to distinguish it from the other French vowels and (3) learning to associate this particular articulatory-auditory package with the letter u, which is never pronounced in this way in English. In more abstract terms, learning a new speech sound involves learning to get the speech organs to adopt a new position or to move in a new way, and to associate this new activity with a new and distinct auditory percept. In the process, students may be led to a new awareness of their own vocal organs, especially if they have not studied a foreign language before. (How many monolingual English speakers stop to think about the position of their tongue and lips when pronouncing the vowel of see?) The association with the letter u is also important because it helps to give students access to the representation of French words in writing. Training in impressionistic phonetics aims to increase students' repertoire of speech sounds beyond what might be found in any particular language. In the ideal case, it would result in mastery of all possible speech sounds of all possible human languages. Students must concentrate on the proprioceptive (tactile and kinaesthetic) sensations associated with producing speech, in order to achieve an increased awareness of, and control over, the movements of their own vocal organs. Training should also result in an increased ability to distinguish between similar sounds and an increased awareness of the relationship between what the speech organs are doing and the auditory percept which results. Thus, the trained impressionistic phonetician, hearing an unfamiliar language for the first time, should be able to make an educated guess as regards what the speaker is doing with his or her vocal organs. This task is made easier if it is possible to look at the speaker. The guess can be refined by repeated listening and by trying to imitate the pronunciation to the satisfaction of a native-speaker informant. The final elements in impressionistic phonetic training are learning to specify speech sounds in terms of universal articulatory dimensions and to use phonetic notation, most commonly the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).Once our trained impressionistic phonetician has worked out what the informant is doing with his or her vocal organs, he or she will want to communicate his or her observations to others. Most commonly, this will involve producing a transcription of the speech, that is, writing the speech down as a string of individual speech sounds (segments), each represented by its own alphabetic letter, as in the example of [fæn] above. Both proprioceptive percepts of position and movement and auditory percepts of sound are entirely personal matters, and it is necessary to have a simple and convenient means of talking about them. In the example of the sound [f], discussed above, the relevant universal dimensions were voicing, place of articulation and manner of articulation, and the specification was voiceless labiodental fricative. If understood literally, the specification refers to the articulatory target for [f], that is, the position of the speech organs which results from the movement of the lower lip upwards to touch the upper teeth and the opening of the vocal folds (though the term fricative also refers to the rasping sound or audible friction which characterises this sound). However, in practice, the specification is also identified with the sound of [f]. It is obviously desireable that phonetic notation should not be tied to any particular language and should not vary between or within languages. For example, in writing English phonetically, the letter f would have to be used rather than for the initial sound of phonetics. Learning to write in IPA notation is, in some respects, easier than learning to write a foreign language. The relation between sounds and symbols is one-to-one; there are no inconsistencies such as the English use of both f and ph to spell the single sound [f], (When letters are used with their universal values, it is customary to enclose them in square brackets, as will be explained below.) However, IPA notation is also more difficult because there are so many more symbols to remember and because it is necessary to concentrate on the individual sounds one by one rather than going for whole words. The characteristic of impressionistic phonetics which we wish to call attention to here, and which distinguishes it from experimental phonetics, is the direct association between articulations and auditory percepts. In reality, of course, there is no direct contact between the speaker's vocal organs and the hearer's ears (except in the case of a speaker listening tonhim- or herself). The two are linked by a sound wave, which travels from the one to the other. However, without the aid of instruments, we have no access to the sound wave itself. Nor do we have a ready-made vocabulary for describing speech sounds in a precise way. If we want to refer to a particular sound there are three options. The first is to produce an imitation of the sound (which is not possible in writing). Then second is to describe how the sound is produced: 'In English spelling, the letter combination ph is used to represent a voiceless labiodental fricative in words of Greek origin.' Thenthird is to refer to the alphabetic or phonetic symbol which we would use to represent it: 'Young children acquiring English often substitute w for.'