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  • Mohamed Amin Ghoues

Speech Sounds Production - Part 1

Human body consists of a large number of muscles ,roughly around 640 to 850..And There are 3 types of them in our body ,viz skeletal, visceral and cardiac.Skeletal muscles are voluntary , and visceral muscles are involuntary;however,there have been many different opinions about the exact number of muscles human body consists of.As far as speech sounds production is concerned , more specifically in anatomy,I am going to throw light on one of these muscular areas in our body and which contributes to the production of these sounds.Chest in this case comprises of various types of contractile muscles that we use for breathing and so the production of sounds.The flow of air is said to have an adventurous journey- the air stream does take a route in which many modifications take place in order to reach the mouth or nose.As a splendid example,let us imagine that the pulmonic air is a bus and all points of restriction are compulsory bus stations .The bus should follow the usual route to get to the first station ( point of obstruction or restriction) then continues to the other one and so does with the rest.Air stream passes through different obstruction points before getting to mouth/nose.This is,by all means,very important for the production of speech sounds when it comes to the distinction between them,either consonant or vowel sounds-we will see why it is so important, in due course.One of these points is larynx. The latter modifies the air flow in many different ways. After, the air goes through what we call the vocal tract, that is the cavity in which sounds that are produced at the larynx are filtered, a term refers to all passages that end at the mouth and nostrils,thus the part comprising the mouth is called the oral cavity and the one that leads to the nostrils is the nasal cavity. Back to muscles there is a large and complex set of muscles that shape the vocal tract, and before learning how these sounds are being produced ,it is necessary to become familiar with the different parts of the vocal tract, these different parts are called articulators,speech apparatus or speech producing organs. The study of these articulators is called articulatory phonetics. I am after tackling each aspect of phonetics and its other branches after dealing first with this branch,which is concerned with the production of speech sounds taking into account the role speech organs play,their anatomy and physiology.


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