Homework #4

Posted Monday September 21st. Due Tuesday September 29th.

1. More phonetic transcription

Transcribe the following sentences using the IPA. Use the phonetic symbols given in Fromkin & Rodman's textbook, and be careful to avoid being misled by the English spellings!

 

a. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

b. The University of Delaware is located in Newark.

c. Wilmington is on this side of Philadelphia.

d. Socks is the first cat, and performs many official functions.

2. Phonetic features

Fromkin & Rodman: Exercises 9 & 11 (p.251).

3. Pronunciation of English plural & past tense suffixes

Here are some examples of the past tense of verbs in English:

warned, fizzed, rigged, rubbed, moved

looked, wished, tripped, laughed, walked, missed

blinded, hunted, depended, wanted

...and here are some examples of the plural of nouns in English:

books, trips, hats, breaks

lambs, fins, logs, braids, hives, rules

watches, wishes, misses, hoses

• Give a phonetic transcription of the word forms above. Be careful to pay attention to how you pronounce the words, and do not be misled by how you spell the words.
• You will notice from your transcriptions that there are three different pronunciations for the past tense suffix, and three different pronunciations for the plural suffix. What are these different pronunciations (6 forms total)? [Note that these different pronunciations of the suffix are known as allomorphs of the past tense morpheme -- this will be discussed more in the classes on morphology.]
• For both the past tense suffix and the plural suffix, try to give a description of when the different pronunciations of the suffix are used. Take advantage of the phonetic terminology that you have learned, and try to be as precise as possible. Note: test your answers by making sure that they correctly predict the pronunciations that you give for the words in the lists above. Tip: pay special attention to the final sound of the stem of each word.
• Finally, you will have noticed that your descriptions of when the different past tense pronunciations are used and when the different plural pronunciations are used are quite similar, but not exactly the same. State what the difference is; why do you think there is this difference?

4. Extra Credit: Speech Demonstrations on-line

Extra credit is available for completing the following exercise, involving a couple of interesting and very useful on-line demonstrations of speech sound production and perception. You will need to use a computer which can play sound-files. All Macintoshes will be able to do this; some, but not all, Windows PCs will be able to do this.

Write a brief description of what the two demonstrations show, and what you learned from them. If you found anything surprising, mention this.

The first demonstration, created by the San Francisco Science Museum gives a illustration of how vocal tract shape determines the sound of vowels.

San Francisco Science Museum (Exploratorium): Vocal Vowels

 

The second demonstration, created by researchers at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, CT, shows how a (crude) version of a spoken utterance can be created by the combination of a number of different tone 'whistles' (pay particular attention to the 'Tone Combinations' page). This demonstration shows how it is possible to perceive sounds as speech, even when they do not have the quality of normal speech. When listening to the example sentences, try to understand the sine-wave sentences first, before listening to the natural speech versions of the sentences. Then go back to listen to the sine-wave versions again - do you notice any difference in your perception of the sine-wave sounds before and after listening to the natural speech versions?

Haskins Laboratories (New Haven, CT): Sine-Wave Speech

[Note that the sine-wave speech example is discussed in the early part of Pinker's chapter 6.]