Complete the account of speech production.
Nearly all speech uses a ______ egressive airstream. Vibration of the vocal folds produces ______ sounds, and the rate of that vibration is the ______ frequency. Lowering the ______ opens the nasal cavity.
Word bank: pulmonic · voiced · fundamental · velum · glottal · formant
Hints
- The first blank names where the air comes from.
- Do not confuse the frequency of fold vibration with a resonance of the tube.
Show the answer
Nearly all speech uses a pulmonic egressive airstream. Vibration of the vocal folds produces voiced sounds, and the rate of that vibration is the fundamental frequency. Lowering the velum opens the nasal cavity.
The third blank is the one to guard: fundamental frequency is the rate the folds vibrate, heard as pitch, while formants are resonances of the tube above, heard as vowel quality. They vary independently, you can sing the same vowel at any pitch.
Practise How Speech Is Produced
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More questions on How Speech Is Produced
- Why does lowering the velum during a bilabial closure change /b/ into /m/?
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- Voicing can switch on and off within a single consonant.
- Sort each articulator by whether it is ACTIVE or PASSIVE.
- Approximately how long is the vocal tract of an adult male, in centimetres?
- Which follow from the fact that speakers produce ten to fifteen sounds per second?
- Match each structure to the contrast it controls.
- Clicks occur only as paralinguistic noises and never as ordinary consonants in a language.