The most sonorous sound, the peak of sonority, is called the nucleus of a syllable. What that means is that a syllable is made up of a vowel, or some other very sonorous sound, with some sounds before it and after it that are less sonorous, usually glides and consonants. You probably know that a syllable is like a beat in the rhythm of the word, so you know that ball has one syllable, basket has two syllables, and bicycle has three.īut what is a syllable, in phonetic terms? A syllable is a peak of sonority that is surrounded by less sonorous sounds. Every single spoken word is made up of one or more syllables. This acoustic notion of sonority plays a role in every language of the world because spoken words are organized around the property of sonority. We’ll learn more about glides when we take a closer look at vowels. The vocal tract is unobstructed for glides, like for vowels, but they are shorter and less sonorous than vowels.
There’s also an intermediate category called glides that have some of the properties of vowels and some of the consonants.
Consonant sounds can be voiced or voiceless. Because the vocal tract is somewhat obstructed, less air flows from the lungs, so these sounds have less energy, they’re less sonorous, and they’re usually shorter than vowels. The sounds that we call consonants are ones where we use our articulators to obstruct the vocal tract, either partially or completely. Make some vowel sounds and notice how you can hold them for a long time: “aaaaa iiiii uuuuu”. Vowel sounds can go on for a long time: if you’re singing, when you hold the note, you hold it on the vowels. We produce vowels with the vocal tract quite open and usually with our vocal folds vibrating so vowels have a lot of acoustic energy: they’re sonorous. Sounds that have less airflow or don’t have voicing from the vocal folds have less sonority. Those two pieces of information, sonority and articulation, allow us to group sounds into three broad categories Sounds that are made with lots of airflow from the lungs, and with vocal folds vibrating, are sonorous sounds. A simple example of this is that a loud sound is more sonorous and a quiet sound is less sonorous. But sonority is not just about loudness. Sonority has to do with the amount of acoustic energy that a sound has. In phonetics, we classify sounds according to how they’re produced, and also according to the acoustic properties of the sounds. The primary acoustic property that we’re interested in is called sonority. Phonation occurs at the larynx, where the vocal folds may or may not vibrate to produce voicing, and then we use our mouth, jaw, lips, teeth and tongue to shape the sound, which is called articulation. The process starts with respiration as air flows up from the lungs. Remember that there are three steps involved in producing speech sounds.
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