Homework #3

Posted Wednesday September 16th, due Tuesday September 22nd. Please do not email these answers - phonetic transcriptions cannot be sent in a regular text email message.

Describing and Transcribing Speech Sounds

Note: in working on this assignment, you should take special care not to be misled by English spelling, which is often quite a poor representation of how a word is pronounced in English. You may find it useful to look over the chart of phonetic symbols and make a list of those symbols which are potentially misleading.

Note 2: transcribe the words/sounds just as you say them. We will assume that your pronunciation corresponds to standard pronunciations in the lower Delaware Valley. If you think your pronunciations will be slightly different from this, then we recommend writing at the top of your homework where you are from.

Reading

Relevant readings to this week's classes and to the exercises below are: Pinker pp.158-175; Fromkin & Rodman pp.216-236, plus the many helpful charts throughout Chapter 6, and on the inside front and back covers of the book.

Exercises

First some simple exercises on transcribing and describing speech sounds. The tables and descriptions of sounds in Fromkin & Rodman's book will be quite useful here.

(1) Fromkin & Rodman, exercise 1 (p.248)

(2) Fromkin & Rodman, exercise 2 (p. 249)

(3) Fromkin & Rodman, exercise 3 (p.249)

(4) Fromkin & Rodman, exercise 4 (p. 249)

(5) Fromkin & Rodman, exercise 6 (p.250)

(6) Fromkin & Rodman, exercise 7 (p.250)

For the final question, you need to use what you have learned about phonetics to explain how people's speech changes when they are unable to use certain articulators.

(7) When you have a cold or the flu, you typically have a stuffed-up nose, and so you are unable to use your nasal cavity in producing speech sounds. As a result, it is quite easy to identify a person with a cold based on their speech -- nasal sounds are typically replaced by sounds which are identical except for the lack of the [nasal] feature.

First transcribe the sentence below using phonetic notation, as if it was spoken by a normal speaker of English. Then transcribe the sentence as it would sound if it was spoken by a person with a heavy cold.

"When the phone rang, Mary's mother told her to stop screaming."