Phonetics Glossary

affricate - a phoneme made by joining a usually plosive stop and a fricative to make a single phoneme.

allophone - predictable phonetic variants of phonemes. Same as a phone.

alveolar ridge - the ridge of bone behind the top teeth.

aspirated - pronounced with audible air flow, or a puff. Refers to voiceless consonants in which the vocal cords remain open briefly after the release of air.

bilabial - involving both lips brought together.

consonant - a sound made involving constriction or closure of the air path. As opposed to a vowel.

dental - involving the teeth.

diphone - loosely, either two phones or 2 phonemes, or some combination of 2 sounds in spoken language.

diphthong - a sound made up of two adjacent, smooth, continuous vowels. A vowel plus a glide.

formant - principle frequencies or resonances of a speech sound.

Fourier analysis - same as spectral analysis.

fricative - a sound in which air flow is partially blocked, resulting in a noisy, hissy sound.

glide - a sound with a smooth rapid transition between two different vowel sounds. Similar to a diphthong and semi-vowel.

glottis - space between the vocal cords, which control air flow between the lungs and mouth.

harmonic - a simultaneous series of pure tones, where the frequencies of each pure tune are integer multiples of the lowest tone, or fundamental frequency.

labial - involving one or both of the lips.

linear predictive coding (LPC) - a method of solving linear differential equations which are mathematical models of a system of resonators, such as the vocal tract.

liquid - A sound which is somewhere between a consonant and a vowel, where the air stream is slightly constricted but not enough to cause friction or hissing. Also known as a semi-vowel.

nasal - a sound that has air flow going through the nose, either instead of or along with flowing through the mouth.

oral - a sound that has air flow going through the mouth, as opposed to air flowing through the nose. Air flow to the nasal passage is blocked by raising the velum.

palate - the roof of the mouth, behind the alveolar ridge, which separates the mouth from the nasal cavity. The palate has two parts: The hard palate, which is at the top front, which has a bony reinforcement, and the soft palate or velum, which is at the top back of the mouth, which is soft and flexible. If it is not specified whether the hard or soft palate is meant, then usually the hard palate is meant.

phone - a physical speech sound, without consideration its use within a language. In other words, it is possible that multiple phones can be considered to be the same phoneme, or that several phones can be entirely absent within a language. Same as an allophone.

phoneme - speech sounds considered to be distinct within a language. Some phonemes can be pronounced in different ways depending on the context of the sound, yet are still considered to be the same phoneme. That is, a single phoneme could be pronounced as different phones.

phonetic alphabet - a set of symbols indicating pronunciation or phonetic segments of speech.

pitch - The perception of frequency of a sound.

pitch-synchronous - signal processing or analysis performed on audio (or other) signal segments which have a length equal to an integer number of fundamental periods.

plosive - an oral or non-nasal consonant which involves complete closure of the air passage in speech articulation, which then ends up bursting in an explosion of air.

prosody - Duration, rhythm, stress, loudness, pitch and tone of a speech sound.

retroflex - articulated with the tongue turned backwards, with the tip of the tongue touching the palate.

soft palate - Same as velum. See palate.

spectral analysis - analysis of a time-domain signal, decomposing the signal into amplitude and phase of sinusoidal functions, i.e. transforming a signal from time-domain to frequency-domain.

stochastic - random. randomly generated, as noise.

stop - Sound in which air flow is stopped in the oral cavity.

supra-segmental - prosodic features, such as duration, rhythm, stress, loudness, and pitch.

timbre - perception of spectral envelope of a sound.

unvoiced - sound uttered without ``voicing'' or oscillating the glottis.

velum - same as the soft palate.

voiced - uttered while ``voicing'' or oscillating the glottis. Voicing introduces harmonics into a sound.

vowel - speech sound made without significantly blocking air passage through the mouth. As opposed to consonant.