Anatomy & Articulators
What is the tongue?
This structure is the primary active articulator used for most speech sounds.
What are vowels?
These sounds are produced without significant obstruction of airflow.
What is fundamental frequency (F0)?
This is the lowest frequency of a sound, perceived as pitch.
What are formants?
Dark horizontal bands on a spectrogram represent these.
This refers to the time between release of a stop and vocal fold vibration.
Voice Onset Time (VOT)
What are intrinsic tongue muscles?
These tongue muscles change the shape of the tongue (not position).
What are place, manner, and voicing?
These are the three main features used to describe consonants.
What are harmonics?
These are whole-number multiples of the fundamental frequency.
What are stops?
This consonant manner is characterized by a period of silence followed by a burst.
Negative VOT indicates this type of voicing.
voiced (pre-voicing)
What are active articulators?
These articulators move to create constriction in the vocal tract.
What is muscle tension (and slight duration difference)?
This feature distinguishes tense from lax vowels.
What are formants?
These are resonant frequency bands of the vocal tract.
What is higher frequency?
Higher place of articulation (more anterior) results in this frequency change.
These are energy dropouts on a spectrogram due to nasal coupling.
antiformants
This is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic tongue muscles.
Intrinsic = shape; Extrinsic = position
Vowels = open airflow; Consonants = obstructed airflow
This is the key difference in airflow between vowels and consonants.
Typical F0 range for adult males.
85–180 Hz
By F1 and F2 patterns
This is how you identify vowels on a spectrogram.
A longer vocal tract results in this effect on formants.
lower formant frequencies
Name one active and one passive articulator involved in producing /t/.
Active: tongue tip; Passive: alveolar ridge
Height, backness, rounding (explain one)
Vowels are classified by height, backness, and rounding:
This is the difference between sound source and filter.
Source = vocal fold vibration; Filter = vocal tract shaping formants
A spectrogram shows strong high-frequency energy with no clear formants—this is likely what manner?
fricatives
Explain why children have higher formant frequencies than adults.
Shorter vocal tract → higher resonant frequencies