Last time we talked about speech sounds and how they are produced ,the air stream and its journey.We also mentioned the term “ Articulatory Phonetics”.To the best of our knowledge, phonetics is the scientific study of speech sounds, and in fact It is only concerned with human speech sounds.Phoneticians therefore divided phonetics into three branches,namely articulatory phonetics,acoustic phonetics and auditory phonetics. Articulatory phonetics studies how speech sounds are produced by means of articulators, hence the name articulatory. It deals with both the anatomy –how organs are structured such as vocal cords and their elasticity-, and with the physiology –and how these organs function such as the tongue which can take different positions and shapes in mouth.Concerning articulators (speech organs) we have two types of organs : passive and active,or mobile and immobile.Passive organs are those which cannot take different positions when the production of sounds such as the hard palate.However,active organs can move.The tongue as an active organ is indispensable for the production of almost all the speech sounds and it can take different positions in the oral cavity . It is divided into different parts, though there are only virtual dividing lines within its structure. These parts are: tip, blade, front, back and root.Here we talk about articulators and how they are structured :
The pharynx is a tube which begins just above the larynx. It is about 2 cm long in women and about 5 cm in men, and at its top end it is divided into two, one 70 part being the back of the oral cavity and the other being the beginning of the way through the nasal cavity. The soft palate or velum allows air to pass through the nose and through the mouth.It is often raised in speech so that air cannot escape through the nose (it can take two positions either raised or lowered), in nasalisation . The other important thing about the soft palate is that it is one of the articulators that can come in contact with the tongue in the production of velar sounds like /k/ and /g/.it is of fleshy material The hard palate is often called the "roof of the mouth". It is bony unlike the soft palate. A consonant made with the tongue close to the hard palate is called palatal. The sound /j/ in 'yellow' is palatal. The alveolar ridge lies immediately after the upper teeth and before the hard palate. Its surface is covered with little ridges. Sounds produced at the level of the alveolar ridge are called alveolar. The teeth (upper and lower) are only at the front of the mouth, immediately behind the lips.The tongue is in contact with the upper side teeth for most speech sounds. Sounds made with the tongue touching the front teeth are called dental. The lips are important in speech. They can be pressed together (when we produce the sounds /p/ ), brought into contact with the teeth (as in /f/ and /v/ ), or rounded to produce the lip-shape for vowels like /u:/. Sounds in which the lips are in contact with each other are called bilabial ( bi which means two,and labium which is a Latin word for lip), while those with lip-to-teeth contact are called labiodental.
The aforementioned articulators described above are the main ones used in speech, but there are a few other things to remember. Firstly, the larynx can be described as an articulator. Secondly, the jaws are sometimes called articulators; the lower jaw is used a lot when speaking. In fact, jaws are not articulators in the same way as the others, because they cannot themselves make contact with other articulators. Finally, although there is practically nothing active that we can do with the nose and the nasal cavity when speaking, they are a very important part of our equipment for making sounds (which is sometimes called our vocal apparatus), particularly nasal consonants such as /m/ and /n/. Nose and nasal cavity cannot be described as articulators too.