Articulatory Phonetics
Articulatory phonetics studies how speech sounds are produced by the Vocal Tract — the mechanical and aerodynamic events by which a speaker shapes an airstream into intelligible sound. It is the oldest of the three branches of Phonetics and provides the descriptive vocabulary most familiar to teachers and learners.
Airstream mechanisms
Sound production begins with an airstream. The pulmonic egressive stream, air pushed outward from the lungs, drives the overwhelming majority of speech sounds in the world's languages and all sounds of English. Non-pulmonic mechanisms include glottalic egressive (ejectives), glottalic ingressive (implosives), and velaric ingressive (clicks), found in languages such as Quechua, Sindhi, and Zulu respectively.
Phonation and articulation
Once airflow is initiated, the vocal folds in the larynx may vibrate (voiced sounds) or remain apart (voiceless sounds). The supralaryngeal vocal tract then modifies the stream. Consonants are described along three dimensions: Place of Articulation (where the obstruction occurs — bilabial, alveolar, velar, etc.), Manner of Articulation (how the obstruction is made — Plosive, Fricative, Nasal, Approximant), and voicing. Vowels are described by tongue height, tongue frontness, and lip rounding, plotted on the vowel quadrilateral established by Jones's Cardinal Vowels.
Methods
Traditional articulatory description relies on introspection and trained auditory observation, codified in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Modern instrumental methods include palatography, ultrasound tongue imaging, electromagnetic articulography (EMA), real-time MRI, and electroglottography. These allow direct measurement of articulator movement and timing during connected speech.
Relevance to ELT
Articulatory description gives pronunciation teachers a concrete way to diagnose and remediate learner errors. Telling a Vietnamese learner that /θ/ is a voiceless dental fricative, and modelling tongue tip between the teeth, is more actionable than asking for a "th sound."
References
- Ladefoged, P., & Johnson, K. (2014). A Course in Phonetics (7th ed.). Cengage Learning.
- Roach, P. (2009). English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course (4th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
- International Phonetic Association (1999). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge University Press.