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 - • Places and Manners of ...
Forming Formants: Acoustic Resonance and Formants - • How Do We Change Our M...
Last episode:
Sheepish Semantics: Lambda Calculus - • How Can One Greek Lett...
Other of our phonetics and phonology videos:
The Melody of Feet: Stress, Iambs, and Trochees - • How Do We Stress Our W...
Good Vibrations: Phonation States, Breathy and Creaky Voice - • Where Does Your Voice ...
Uncommon Sounds: Ejectives, Implosives, and Clicks - • Non-Pulmonic Consonant...
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We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
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:
clas.mq.edu.au/...
clas.mq.edu.au/...
Rob Hagiwara's page is also helpful:
home.cc.umanito...
And some from Kevin Russell, as well:
home.cc.umanito...
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:
www.fon.hum.uva...
We're taking a couple of weeks off, but we'll be back posting videos on June 1. Looking forward to seeing you then!

[@abdulgafoor7076]

How harmonics are produced when we do hissing "s"sound??

[@zuzanadadova423]

Hi! Thanks for the video, it helped me a lot to differentiate the sound in the spectrogram. But I have always had a doubt concerning the segmentation of occlusive sounds. When I segment speech on spectrogram, should I count the "silent" moment before the occlusive sounds like [k] or [p] as an obligatory part of these sound, or the only part that counts is the segment between the stop and the next sound? Anyway, thank you for the video! Very helpful!

[@notoriouswhitemoth]

-I have that same tonberi plushee ^,,^ The precision involved in the spoken word really is an amazing thing~

[@thelingspace]

+notoriouswhitemoth Cool! It's a very cute plushie. And I do think as well that how well we can process sound waves, over such short periods of time, is really amazing. It's part of what draws me to phonetics overall. ^_^

[@abdulgafoor7076]

Vocal folds vibrate at specific frequency right then where do all these harmonics come from ?? Is there any video to visualise

[@ahmedayyad5840]

Thank you

[@boldblazervids]

It's very rare that I get to watch a video this early after it's uploaded.

[@abdulgafoor7076]

How all the harmonics are produced by the vocal folds at the same time??? Does all soundS produce this kind of multiple frequencies?? Pls resolve this sir I've seen all of ur videos I didn't get the answer

[@somersetsandra]

Hi, a video on the English articulatory settings, or contrasting the French and English articulatory setting, would be great. Sandra

[@thelingspace]

We'll consider this as a video topic! For now, here's a Tumblr post we did before on articulatory settings: thelingspace.tumblr.com/post/102932793909/articulatory-settings

[@Pining_for_the_fjords]

What about plosive consonants at the end of a syllable? For example, how do we distinguish rack, rat and rap? Is it purely from the aspiration after the final consonant?

[@thelingspace]

+Conway79 Thanks for the question! Yeah, at the end of the syllable, plosives have a much harder time. If you actually release the consonant, then there can be some clue there, but that's not a given; plosives that don't have any further coming after them can often stay unreleased. We can't count on getting [ɹæk] so we can tell it apart from [ɹæt]; we might easily get [ɹæk̚ ] instead, where you just leave your tongue up at the soft palate and call it a day. So what that means is that really, what we have to tell us which of the stops we're hearing at the end is formant transitions, and while we're good at attending to those, that's not really robust information. If you're of a phonetically-driven phonology bent, you might consider this to be part of the reason that so many languages disallow plosives from coda position. Codas are already not great compared to onsets when they have their own phonetic cues the way that sonorant sounds like nasals or approximants do. But for plosives, there's potentially only that formant transition to hold onto. Since they're not easily recoverable, languages may over time have categorically moved towards getting rid of plosives at the end of syllables. Of course, many languages do still allow them, but it's a challenge to hear them all!

[@zuleykaponce2221]

you're awesome! thanks for your videos

[@cynthiamagana4518]

LOOOL makes learning fun thanks!!!!

[@carrotjuice1890]

Omg loving it!

[@thelingspace]

+Carrot Juice? Thanks for the kind words! Phonetics is a lot of fun. ^_^

[@Prof_Granpuff]

Awesome video! Love the Homestuck art lol

[@thelingspace]

+itsadonigma Thanks! Glad you liked the video. And yeah, even though it technically wasn't a Homestuck episode, we figured we'd smuggle in some, considering the personal connections between Undertale and Homestuck. ^_^

[@Haneiichan]

AHHH! Temptations! I just stopped playing FFXIV and deltarune to get back to studying for speech science (graduate SLP student from Canada. Hiiii!). Came across your awesome video. Thank you!

[@thelingspace]

Glad to be able to help! They're good games. Deltarune was pretty fun! Looking forward to seeing where it goes. And good luck with the SLP program! ^_^

[@katieking6405]

Legend

[@Altairi2010]

Could you please make a video on Optimality Theory?

[@thelingspace]

It's definitely on our list! Thanks for the suggestion. We'll get there. ^_^

[@Altairi2010]

Thank you very much. I appreciate your reply. Also could you please make a video about the emergent theory compared to the innateness theory?

[@thelingspace]

Yeah, I am starting to think this is something we should probably tackle at some point. It's not our theoretical background (we're all generativist), but it's worth discussing. We'll just have to be very careful when we do it to present it in a neutral way. We know we're working against bias on that one.

[@TeronMer]

Now I'm more than happy to admit being wrong if I am, but wouldn't a better way of structuring the title of this video be either: 'How do we tell consonants apart? Obstruent Acoustics' or 'How do we distinguish consonants? Obstruent Acoustics' I've always thought 'tell apart' as a verb needed to be split?

[@R.F.9847]

If I'm understanding your question right, separable phrasal verbs don't *have* to be separated, unless the object is a pronoun. tell apart consonants tell consonants apart * tell apart them tell them apart

[@TeronMer]

R.F. Ah ok, I was thinking they needed to be split regardless of what the object is.

[@thelingspace]

+Viribus _ Yep, I agree with +R.F. here. It's a good analysis. Thanks for the question, though! ^_^

[@englishaghelian3738]

Hello, you are awesome, but sorry you speak too fast which is hard for non native speakers (like me)to understand it, any way thanks alot🌷

[@zulik9224]

Say Ř

[@sarahzanders3481]

he's talking about how u talk not constants😐😐😐

[@so_maya5634]

Amazing but you talk so fast.