ARTICULATIONS

INTRODUCTION. Articulatory (articulations) in phonetics refers to the movements of the articulators which include the tongue, lips, jaw and other organs that are involved with the acoustic properties and the production in the human system of the speech sounds. Various important factors are involved in the speech production such as the vocal organs, the articulation of consonant sound, the places of the articulation, the manner of articulation and the air that plays a vital an important role in this process of sounds. GENERAL ASPECTS. The production of sounds speech depends on the articulatory processes, this sounds that are commonly divided in two categories or groups, vowels and consonants in which the air stream passes through the vocal fact, where vowels are considered as open sounds, but consonants are sounds produced with a constriction in the oral cavities (or pharyngeal) during the production of these type of sounds. Vowels are distinguished from the consonants because they are highly resonant. Therefore vowels are louder and more intense than consonants, it must be mentioned that vowels have a greater sonority of a sound than the consonants (stress and pitchy) because it is loudness to other sounds with the same length with a no significant constriction of the vocal tract (open sounds). Consonants are produced with a significant constriction of the vocal tract, for most of the cases in consonants this constrictions comes along with sagittal midline (it divides the vocal tract into right and left halves) that means they are generated with or without simultaneous vocal vibrations and can be

voiced (normal circulation of air and can continue) or voiceless (when the sound has to stop, non-continuants). Phonation modes in articulation describes if a sound is voiceless or voiced as it was already mentioned in consonants or, more generally, it describes all the means by which the larynx functions as a source of sound. Phonation really is the most important function of the larynx as a sound. There are six modes of phonation. Voiceless: absence of any vocal fold vibration. vocal folds far enough apart to allow a laminar. Voiced: normal vocal fold vibration of larynx. Closing: movement causes aspirated sound. Whisper: greater constriction of the vocal folds than with voicelessness. Breathy voice: normal vocal fold. The vocal organs play one of the most important roles in the speech and articulations sounds because is in here where the basic source of the power of the sounds is the respiratory system for all them. The air from the lungs goes to the windpipe (which is the trachea) and in the larynx. This wind passes between the small muscular folds or halves called the vocal cords and if the vocal cords are apart, the air from the lungs are a free passage into pharynx and in the mouth when the sounds are produced by changing the shape of the resonance chambe that happens in the vocal tract. The shape of the resonance can be divided into different categories: alveolar plosive where the tongue is against the alveolar ridge and the other one is the velar plosive where the back of the tongue is against the soft palate. The fricative where there is an incomplete closure in the mouth (air escapes with friction), labiodental where lips and teeth are used, the nasal stop when the air is stopped in the oral cavity and it passes through the

nose, we have nasal stop. The affricative is when there is a combination of sounds and the air stream is partially stopped or obstructed (best known as continuous frication in the sound). In speech there are variations in stress in pitch, tone, intonation and tempo they are known as suprasegmentals. These variations are used in the language to make a difference between a noun and a verb. It is also a vocal effect that extends over more than one sound segment in an utterance that applies to groups of segments, rather than to individual segments. However the three main suprasegmentals are the stress that emphasis in pitch, loudness or the duration. The intonation that is almost always usually used as a characteristic of declaratives intonations rising and falling pitch over an utterance and the last one that is tone that uses the pitch on a sequence of sounds for lexical information (words), and either is not contrastive with the language. Place of articulation is the place which indicate and where it denotes the area within the vocal tract also is the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract. The place of articulation is defined as both active and passive articulators, for one thing, the active lower lip may contact either a passive upper lip (bilabial) or the upper teeth (labiodental) the hard palate is contacted either the front or the back of the tongue Along with the manner of articulation, it gives the consonant its distinctive sound. The following places of articulation: bilabial, labial, dental (apico-dental; lamino-dental), alveolar (apico-alveolar; lamino-alveolar; lamino-postalveolar), palatar

(apico-palatal; lamino-palatal), velar, uvular, pharyngeal and glottal. Manner of articulation is related to the kind of constriction (as in consonants) to the place and the most important to the organ produces for the realization of a consonant sound. There are different manners of articulations, ranging for the complete closure for the production of stop-plosives ( specific points in the vocal tract) to those one which is a very limited construction of the vocal tract in the production of sounds so that those are the reasons that are

possible to have many different sounds of consonants sounds at the same pace of articulation. The manners of articulation are described as follows: stop, fricative, approximant, nasal, tap, flap and trill. In articulation diphthongs are vowel sounds that demonstrate articulatory movements during its production they are also types of vowels where two vowel sounds are connected in a continuous, gliding motion. . In production diphthongs are essential portions of the tongue that mover from a lower to a higher position, certain diphthongs are related to centering diphthongs where the offglide or the prominent element of the diphthong is a central vowel, nonphonemic diphthong where the meaning would not change if the vowel were to be pronounced as a monophthong. In a phonemic diphthong the meaning of a particular word would change if the vowel was produced. In articulations a monophthong is a vowel sound one whose articulation at both in the beginning and in the end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation, as happens in diphthongs.

CONCLUTION. Articulatory phonetics is the oldest of the three fields in the phonetics and phonology is also the one in which the concepts that are fundamental to phonetic and phonology study were first defined. This part of field of

phonetics is related to the speaker and studies in order to make now how the air stream and the different parts of the vocal tract that include the manner of articulations and the places of articulations move and interact to produce the actual sounds of speech that are vocal and consonants . For example,the movements about how the lips, teeth and air are used to produce the sound at the beginning of the word. Furthermore this field also

studies to the classification and categorization of speech sounds, such as vowels and consonants When we speak we articulate the organs that form part of this field of phonetics, but we do this kind of actions in a non-conscious activity that is part of our vocal movements that help us to have a natural language which guide that sounds that we produce in order to give a meaning about those sounds that are perceived (perception) by the listener.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. - Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumwright, D. G. (2005). Anatomy and physiology for speech and language (3rd ed.). Clifton Park, NY: Delmar. - Zemlin, W. R. (1997). Speech and hearing science: Anatomy and physiology (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. - Ashby, P. (2005). Speech sounds. London: Routledge. -Davenport, M., & Hannahs, J. (2006). Introducingphonetics and phonology. London: Arnold.