Tenseness
The vowel diagram provides us with a rough idea of how vowels should sound. But it does not help us pronounce them precisely since some vowels share the same coordinate points. /i/ and /ɪ/, for example, are high and front vowels. Since they are produced in close proximity, these two vowels can be hard to distinguish and thus hard to pronounce correctly for us non-native English speakers. So we need a way to distinguish them. Linguists distinguish /i/ and /ɪ/ by the tenseness. To say /i/, we need to make the muscles in the vocal tract work hard. The lips are pulled back and the tongue is tense. But when we say /ɪ/, the vocal tract is relaxed. So for example, ‘beet’ and ‘bit’, ‘peach’ and ‘pitch’ are contrasted by the vowel sounds being tense in the first words but lax in the second. Similarly, in ‘kook’ and ‘cook,’ the first word has a tense vowel /u/, and the second has a lax vowel /ʊ/. Vowels that are located at the peripheral regions of the vowel diagram, except /æ/, are called tense vowels because the pronunciation of these sounds requires some muscular effort. Vowels that occur in the center region including /æ/ are called lax vowels, by contrast.
Similar sounding vowel pairs
Vowels that are near each other in the vowel diagram are produced with tongue
positions that are close to each other and thus sound similar. In other words, vowels that occur in proximity can be more difficult to differentiate than those that are farther apart in the vowel diagram. For this reason, we first learn individual vowels and then compare vowels in close proximity. Among the 10 pure vowels, (/i/, /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/, /u/, /ʊ/, /ɔ/, /ɑ/, /ə/, /ʌ/), the proximal vowel pairs are these:
/i/ and /ɪ/
/ɛ/ and /æ/
/u/ and /ʊ/
/ɔ/ and /ɑ/
/ə/ and /ʌ/
We’ll learn these vowel pairs. In particular, to differentiate the proximal vowels, we will use the minimal pair technique. A minimal pair is a pair of words that differ in a single phoneme. Minimal pairs are often used to demonstrate that two sounds (or phones) are two separate phonemes in the language. For example, we can demonstrate that /s/ and /z/ contrast in English by adducing minimal pairs such as bus and buzz. Since the only difference in these words is the /s/ vs. /z/, we can conclude that they belong to distinct phonemes.
In addition, we will also learn the five diphthongs of standard American English. They are /eɪ/, /aɪ/, /ɔɪ/, /aʊ/ and /oʊ/. The diphthongs can be divided into two groups based on the final vowel sound, /ɪ/ or /ʊ/. Those ending with /ɪ/ are /eɪ/, /aɪ/ & /ɔɪ/, and those that end with /ʊ/ are /aʊ/ and /oʊ/. Regarding /eɪ/ and /oʊ/, the first sounds in these diphthongs, /e/ and /o/ do not occur on their own as vowel phonemes in American English. As you can see in the vowel diagram, /e/ and /ɛ/, /o/ and /ɔ/ are pronounced in proximity, meaning that /e/ and /ɛ/ sound similar, and /o/ and /ɔ/ also sound similar. Compared with /ɛ/ and /ɔ/, /e/ and /o/ occur at higher position.
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