How Do We Tell Apart Consonants? Obstruent Acoustics

How do we wade through hissing or silence to tell consonants apart? Which cues do we grab onto to get us on top of these sound waves? In this week's episode, we take a look at obstruent acoustics: how they differ from vowels or other sonorous sounds, how the way we make fricatives influences the way they sound to us, and how we latch onto lightning-quick changes to tell us what stop we just heard.

This is Topic #70!

This week's tag language: Nepali!

Related episodes:
Minding Your Manners: Places and Manners of Articulation - https://youtu.be/zEaPQP3pXQc
Forming Formants: Acoustic Resonance and Formants - https://youtu.be/jl4zGRSYqkE

Last episode:
Sheepish Semantics: Lambda Calculus - https://youtu.be/BwWQDzXBuwg

Other of our phonetics and phonology videos:
The Melody of Feet: Stress, Iambs, and Trochees - https://youtu.be/MdId9wnMNg8
Good Vibrations: Phonation States, Breathy and Creaky Voice - https://youtu.be/edYLoMRgaFw
Uncommon Sounds: Ejectives, Implosives, and Clicks - https://youtu.be/JKP10ARLnzM

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Sources:
Much of the information in this episode comes from Henry Rogers's book The Sounds of Language, and Peter Ladefoged's book A Course in Phonetics.
Here are some webpages that are helpful for getting more info:
Robert Mannell and Felicity Cox:
http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/acoustics/speech_spectra/fricatives.html
http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/acoustics/speech_spectra/oral_stops.html

Rob Hagiwara's page is also helpful:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~robh/howto.html#figstops

And some from Kevin Russell, as well:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/phonetics/acoustic/spectrogram-sounds.html

Finally, we really encourage you to download Praat, and just talk into it so you can look at your own spectrograms! Praat's free and powerful, and it's always more fun when it's your own voice:
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/download_win.html

We're taking a couple of weeks off, but we'll be back posting videos on June 1. Looking forward to seeing you then!

Видео How Do We Tell Apart Consonants? Obstruent Acoustics канала The Ling Space