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Chapter 3: Transcribing Speech Sounds
In addition to segmental information about speech sounds, many languages make use of
prosody or suprasegmental information. Suprasegmental information includes the pitch,
loudness, and length of sounds, and these factors contribute to the rhythm and stress patterns of spoken language. Check Yourself
1. Young children’s voices are usually recognizably different from adult’s
voices. Which factor is likeliest to be different between children’s speech and adults’ speech? • Word length. • Tone. • Pitch.
2. In English, yes-no questions often conclude with rising pitch,
whereas wh-questions often have a falling pitch on the final words. Is this
pitch difference a difference in tone or in intonation? • Tone. • Intonation. • Pitch.
3. English uses pitch as one factor in syllable stress. There are many
English pairs of words like record (noun) and record (verb), which are
spelled the same but differ in their stress patterns. Which of the following
is true for this pair of words? •
The first syllable has higher pitch than the second in the noun record. •
The second syllable has higher pitch than the first in the noun record. Answers Video Script
So far all the sounds we’ve been considering are segments: the individual speech
sounds that we represent with IPA symbols. But when we speak, we also include
sounds that are above or beyond the level of the segments. This sound
information is called prosody, or suprasegmental information, and it makes up
the rhythm, timing, meter, and stress of the words and sentences that we speak.
The primary pieces of suprasegmental information are the pitch of sounds,
the loudness, and the length.
The pitch of a sound is how high or low it is. We produce high pitched
sounds when our vocal folds have a high-frequency vibration, and when
our vocal folds vibrate more slowly, the resulting sound is lower in pitch.
Some languages use pitch information to signal changes in word meaning.
If a language uses pitch this way, the pitch information is called tone.
These example words are from Yoruba, a language spoken in Nigeria. If
you look just at the segmental level, these words all seem to be
transcribed the same. But speakers of Yoruba vary their pitch when they
speak these words so that the meaning of the word changes depending on
whether the second syllable has a high tone, a mid-tone, or a low
tone. Probably the best-known tone language is Mandarin, which has five
different tones. Looking at these five words, you can see that they contain
the same segments, but it’s the tones that distinguish their meaning.
Languages also use pitch in another way, not to change word meaning,
but to signal information at the level of the discourse, or to signal a
speaker’s emotion or attitude. When pitch is used this way, it’s
called intonation rather than tone. English uses pitch for intonation —
let’s look at some examples.
Sam got an A in Calculus.
Sam got an A in Calculus!
Sam got an A in Calculus?
Sam? got an A? in Calculus?
All of these sentences contain the same words (and the same segments)
but if we vary the intonation, we convey something different about the
speaker’s attitude towards the sentence’s meaning. Notice that we
sometimes use punctuation in our writing to give some clues about a sentence’s prosody.
Another component of suprasegmental information is the length of
sounds. Some sounds are longer than others. Listen carefully to these two
words in English. beat, bead. The vowel sound in both words is the high
front tense vowel [i]. But in bead, the vowel is a little longer. This is a
predictable process in English — vowels get longer when there’s a voiced
sound in the coda of the syllable. The diacritic to indicate that a segment
is long looks a bit like a colon [iː].
So a sound can change in length as the result of a predictable articulatory
process, or, like intonation, length can signal discourse-level information
about an utterance. Consider the difference between, That test was
easy, and, That test was eeeeeeeeeeeeeaaasyyyyyyyy. Some languages
use length contrastively, that is, to change the meaning of a word. In
these words in Yapese, a language of the Western Pacific region, you can
see that making a vowel long leads to a completely different word with a
new meaning. In these words from Italian, consonant length can change
the meaning of a word, so fato means fate, but fatto means fact.
To sum up, suprasegmental information, also known as prosody, is that
sound information that’s above the level of the segment. It consists of
pitch, loudness, and length. Many languages use prosody to provide
discourse-level information, and some languages also use prosody to change word meanings. Previous/next navigation BACK TO TOP LICENSE
Essentials of Linguistics Copyright © 2018 by Catherine Anderson is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
International License, except where otherwise noted.
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