Phonology

Coarticulation

• Coarticulation = the process of making one sound virtually at the same time as the next sound

Two coarticulation effects:

1. Assimilation = the process whereby a feature of one sound becomes part of another during speech production

• happens simply because it’s quicker, easier and more efficient

• “I have to go” - In this phrase, as we start to say the /t/ sound in to, which is voiceless, we tend to produce a voiceless version of the preceding sound resulting in what sounds more like /f/ than /v/ (“hafta”)

• “Any vowel becomes nasal whenever it immediately precedes a nasal.”

1. Elision = the process of leaving out a sound segment in the pronunciation of a word (omitting d in friendship)

• “You and me” – pronouncing [juənmi], we are omitting [d], because of a preceding nasal [n] and a following nasal [m], we simply don’t devote speech energy to including the stop sound [d]

• no [d] sound included in the everyday pronunciation of a word like friendship [frɛnʃɪp]

• it isn’t laziness, it’s efficiency

Types of features

• Binary features

• voicing [+ voice] [- voice]

• nasality [+nasal] [- nasal]

• Unary features

• [coronal]

• [labial]

• [dorsal]

• Multivalued

• constriction: [stop] [fricative] [approximant]

Obstruent