Portal:Phonology

1 Phonology & Pronunciation Portal

This site includes handouts on:

• Segmentals - vowels and consonants
• Prosody - intonation, rhythm, stress
• Prosodic effects - natural speech phenomena such as assimilation (blending), linking (liaison), contractions, and others
• Pronunciation pedagogy

Most are currently in the form of old PDF handouts; more wiki pages with updated contents will be added over time. Scroll down for a full list of entries.

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1.1 Phonology & Pronunciation Overview

Teaching or learning pronunciation requires at least some knowledge of applied phonology. Phonology refers to the general sound system of a language (how sounds are organized in the language), while phonetics deals with more specific sounds and how they are produced. Teachers will benefit from some basic knowledge of both fields. Here are some starters for teachers.

• Improving your pronunciation
• Pronunciation: Teaching overview - basic exercises and interactive activities

Here are a few basic handouts on phonetics that are relevant to phonology neophytes, as phonetics is foundational to phonology.

• Phonology terminology
• Side (sagittal) view of vocal organs
• IPA chart (way more detail than you'll ever need)
• Typical ESL/EFL pronunciation issues of Koreans
• IPA exercise
• IPA exercise answer key

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1.2 Vowels & Consonants

Vowels and consonants are called segmentals - individual sounds into which words can be segmented. Phonemes are general sound categories that are distinctive in the language; e.g., /b/ and /p/ are considered different sounds in English, since bat is a distinctly different word from pat.

1.3 Phonemes

1.3.1 Wiki pages

1.3.2 Links / PDFs

• Minimal pairs page for English phonemes
• Pronunciation drills: Typical drills for teaching phonemes
• List of English phonemes for evaluation or self-evaluation
• Spelling-phoneme patterns

1.4 Consonants

1.4.1 Wiki pages

  Consonant /r/ phoneme

  Consonant phonemes /ʒ/, /ʃ/

  Consonant phonemes /θ/ and /ð/ in spelling

  Consonant spelling patterns

  Consonant th phonemes

  English consonants

  Fricative consonants practice

  Palatal consonant phonemes /ʤ/, /ʧ/

1.4.2 Links / PDFs

• Overview of English consonant system
• Stop consonants
• /f/ and /v/
• sounds /θ/ & /ð/
• spelling patterns
• /l/ and /r/
• Alveolar /z/
• Palatal consonants
• Consonant clusters

1.5 Vowels

1.5.1 Wiki pages

  English vowels

  Trisyllabic deletion

  Trisyllabic laxing

  Vowel /eɪ/ phoneme (long vowel)

  Vowel /ou/ phoneme (long vowel)

  Vowel /æ/ phoneme

  Vowel /ʊ/ phoneme (short vowel)

  Vowel /ʌ, ə, ɜ/ phonemes (short central vowels)

  Vowel /ɪ/ phoneme (short vowel)

1.5.2 Links / PDFs

• Overview of vowel system
• Tense & lax /i/, /<small I</small /
• Lax vowel /æ/ cf. /ε/
• Long /ei/ & short /ε/
• Long & short /ou/, /υ/
• Tense & lax /u/
• Schwa and /ʌ/
• Tense and lax vowel alternations
• Comparison of American, UK, Australian vowels

1.6 Consonant - vowel interactions and morphology

1.6.1 Wiki pages

  Colloquial contractions

  Consonant phonemes /θ/ and /ð/ in spelling

  Consonant spelling patterns

1.6.2 Links/PDFs

Morphology refers to word formation, e.g., by means of prefixes and suffixes; these often involve pronunciation changes and variant forms, such as multiple pronunciations of -ed and plural -s.

• Vocalic /r/
• Consontant-vowel interactions
• Final consonants and syllabic consonants
• The -ed, -s, -es endings

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1.7 Other Links

• Sounds of English
• Minimal pairs for English phonemes: a good collection of minimal pairs - exmaples of all possible phonemic vowel and consonant contrasts are given, including less common contrasts (like the fricative consonants); includes British vowels, too
• Phonetics flash animation practice (U. Iowa phonetics site)
• English phonetics and phonology for non-native speakers
• Tongue twisters website (also, tongue twisters for other languages)
• Phoneme flashcards for kids
• MoreWords] (Here you can search for words by spelling patterns)

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1.8 Youtube Videos

My own Youtube videos on pronunciation and phonology will hopefully start appearing in 2017. But these are a good start.

1.8.1 Pronunciation teaching videos

• Teaching vowel phonemes (so-so)
• Teaching linking
• Intonation stress (boring)
• Pronunciation: Compound stress
• Teaching lexical stress
• Breathing techniques (e.g., aspirated consonants)

1.8.2 Other videos

• English phonology for Koreans (CTL)
• Conducting classes & lectures in English (for teachers) (CTL)
• Freedom from English (세바시): A talk by Kent Lee on how not to learn English, and how to learn it the right way - so that it does not become a form of bondage or slavery, but a useful tool for you. A talk from the 세바시 (세상을 바꾸는 시간 15분, Korean CBS-TV).

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1.9 Featured pedagogy & practice items

1.10 General

1. Pronunciation: Teaching overview
2. Pronunciation: Listening exercises
3. Pronunciation: Production exercises
4. Pronunciation: Controlled activities
5. Pronunciation: Interactive activities
6. Improving your pronunciation
7. Common English pronunciation problems for Koreans

1.11 Practice materials

(including dialogues - especially good for contrastive stress and sentence stress)

  Air-headed customer

  Argument clinic

  Awkward dialogues

  Coffee shop confusion

  Film project

  Fricative consonants practice

  Limericks

  Misheard song lyrics

  Mr. Obvious: The critter

  Oaths of office

  Tongue twisters

  Who's on first?

Also:

• Simple rhymes
• Poems, limericks, longer rhymes, etc.
• Dialogues and monologues
• Shorter readings
• Longer readings
• Jazz chants

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1.12 Phonology & pronunciation topics

  APP (Hanyang)

  Bisyllabic stress alternation

  Colloquial contractions

  Compound & phrasal stress

  Consonant /r/ phoneme

  Consonant phonemes /ʒ/, /ʃ/

  Consonant phonemes /θ/ and /ð/ in spelling

  Consonant spelling patterns

  Consonant th phonemes

  Discussion questions for listening-speaking class

  English allophones

  English consonants

  English lexical stress patterns

  English pronunciation poems

  English stress patterns (overview)

  English vowels

  Fricative consonants practice

  Palatal consonant phonemes /ʤ/, /ʧ/

  Phoneme

  Pronunciation: Controlled activities

  Pronunciation: Interactive activities

  Pronunciation: Listening exercises

  Pronunciation: Production exercises

  Trisyllabic deletion

  Trisyllabic laxing

  Vowel /eɪ/ phoneme (long vowel)

  Vowel /ou/ phoneme (long vowel)

  Vowel /æ/ phoneme

  Vowel /ʊ/ phoneme (short vowel)

  Vowel /ʌ, ə, ɜ/ phonemes (short central vowels)

  Vowel /ɪ/ phoneme (short vowel)

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1.13 Stress, Intonation, Prosody

Above the level of segmentals (vowels, consontants) are suprasegmentals - intonation and stress patterns. These suprasegmentals interact sometimes with the segmental pronunciation, in the form of contractions, blending of sounds (assimilation), cutting off sounds (truncation), and such (natural and fast speech phenomena). Prosody refers to the rhythm of the language, which is affected by suprasegmental features and these related speech phenomena.

1.14 Word stress

• Stress: Overview
• Old English / Germanic lexical stress patterns
• Contrastive noun/verb stress pairs
• Latin stress patterns (general)
• Greek stress patterns
• French stress patterns
• Secondary lexical stress
• Latin/Greek i-stem suffixes
• Latin/Greek e-stem suffixes
• Stress shifts with suffixes
• Exercising word stress
• Compound stress

1.15 Stress and intonation beyond word level

• Phrasal stress
• Sentence stress (intro)
• Sentence stress, part 2
• Contrastive stress forms
• Sentence intonation
• Backgrounded phrases in intonation

1.16 Overview of prosody

• Connected / natural speech phenomena in English (intro)
• Connected / natural speech phenomena, part 2
• Contractions

1.16.1 Stress, intonation, prosodic effects

• Colloquial contractions
• Compound nouns and WPD version
• The i-stem suffixes: i-stem suffixes like -ion, -ious, -ial, etc., which invariably shift stress to the preceding syllable; also, e-stem suffixes; WPD version
• Common lexical stress patterns in English, and stress identification guidelines; WPD version
• Neutral and strong affixes: overview of neutral suffixes that don't affect stress, strong suffixes that lead to stress shifts; [WPD version
• Neutral and strong suffixes #2: more detailed presentation of suffixes and stress patterns; WPD version
• Phrasal verbs
• Stress shifts in word formation (stress & morphology) [WPD version, [http://www.kentlee7.com/phon/stress_shifts_alt.pdf older PDF version
• Sentence stress: overview of sentence stress rules
• Background info & other phrases that do not receive sentence stress; also, overview of sentence stress and contrastive stress

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1.17 List of portals

• Shortcuts to this page: WP:PORT • P:

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1.18 List of category pages

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