8 Speech Articulators
Speech articulators
Overview of the vocal tract
Spoken language is articulated by manipulating parts of the body inside the vocal tract, such as the lips, tongue, and other parts of the mouth and throat. The vocal tract is often depicted in a diagram that represents the inside of the head as if it were split down the middle between the eyes. Diagrams are conventionally oriented with the nostrils and lips on the left and the back of the head on the right, so that we are viewing the inside of the human head from its left side. The main regions and individual articulators of the vocal tract labelled in the diagram below are defined and described in more detail in the rest of this section and the following sections.
Open spaces in the vocal tract
There are three important open regions of the vocal tract. The oral cavity is the main interior of the mouth, taking up space horizontally from the lips backward. The pharynx is behind the oral cavity and tongue, forming the upper part of what we normally think of as the throat. Finally, the nasal cavity is the open interior of the head above the oral cavity and pharynx, from the nostrils backward and down to the pharynx.
The bottom of the pharynx splits into two tubes: the trachea (also known as the windpipe), which leads down to the lungs, and the esophagus, which leads down to the stomach. The esophagus is not normally relevant for phonetics, but the trachea is important, since the vast majority of spoken language is articulated with air coming from the lungs, there are ways we can manipulate that airflow when it passes from the trachea to the pharynx.
Phones as a basic unit of speech
The pieces of the vocal tract can be articulated in various ways to create and manipulate a wide range of sounds. In the phonetics of spoken languages, we are primarily interested in studying units of speech called phones or speech sounds. It is difficult to provide a precise definition of what a phone is, either in general or for a specific spoken language, but roughly speaking, a phone in a spoken language is a linguistically significant sound, which means that can be used as part of an ordinary word in that language. For example, the ordinary English words spill, slip, lisp, and lips each contain four phones; in fact, these words have the same four phones, just in different orders (with some slight variation in how they are pronounced).
There are many other sounds we can produce with the vocal tract or even with other body parts, such as burps, finger snaps, etc., which are not typically studied in phonetics, because they are not known to be phones in any spoken language. However, even though they do not occur in ordinary words, they may still be used to express non-linguistic meaning. For example, in some cultures, snapping fingers can indicate quickness or a desire for attention.
Note that spoken languages may differ in how they use phones and whether they even use the same phones at all. For examp