Study about Phonetic

Welcome: Study about Phonetic
Description: This webquest is a summary from Chapter 3 from a book called Phonology and Language use from Joan Bybee, curently this book is used a the main material from Phonetics and Phonology class at UNAD . This webquest supplies important information for people who are studying English as a foreign language in order to make their learning process easier.Chapter 3 describes the evidence of detailed and redundant specification of phonetic features in stored representations. Miller(1994) concluded phonetic categories are both context-depend and multiply specified.Through the chapter we can see that in certain cases of variation and change, specific lexical items can have their own ranges of variation that cannot be captured by a phonemic representation.There are voiced and voiceless sounds ; particularly in English the duration between these sounds is much greater than in other language. In fact, according to what Zimmerman & Sapon stated in 1958 the length is four times greater than in other languages. On the other hand, there is no structural reason to postulate that English has lexical nasalized vowels. Vowel length in English is predictable from voicing of the final consonant, the analysis presented in the chapter predicts future changes in English : final devoicing will leave the vowel length and nasal no nasal contrast intact.Learning a language is not an easy task, due to quantity of variations that exist between languages in the case of Spanish speaking students who are learning English , it's even harder because Spanish comes from a different family so students need to realize the variations that exist in the language and how to work with them.
Grade Level: College / Adult
Curriculum: Foreign Language
Keywords: Phonetics, Phonology, language variations
Author(s): Muhamad Ilham