Pronunciation and phonology in the EFL Classroom - Manner of Articulation Pt. 3
And now we have our nasal sounds. There are three nasal sounds and basically the pattern of air that's moving out of our vocal tract has to do with two big instances and that is a closure in the vocal tract. Except aside from the plosives and affricates, what we have is air escaping through our nasal cavity. These sounds include ?m?, ?n? and ?ng?. We're moving from the front of the mouth to the back of the mouth. First with the M sound or the ?m?, we're closing both lips and the air is escaping through the nasal passage ?m?. Next we have our N sound or our ?n? sound. There, the closure is inside the mouth but our tongue is closing up near our alveolar ridge and the air is escaping through the nose. Again that's ?n?. Finally we have our NG sound and the closure there is happening further back in the vocal tract and now we're producing a sound such as ?ng?. It's not a wonderful sound but nonetheless we do need to use it especially with our present participles and our gerunds. Continuing on with the manner of articulation we have our lateral sound. There's only one of them. I like to think of it as our lonely lateral sound. The lateral sound is the L sound or ?l?. It's called lateral because the tip of the tongue is placed on the alveolar ridge and air escapes through the mouth laterally along both sides of the tongue. Again that's lateral sounds and ?l?. If you try that at home you can get again an appreciation of where the air is going. It's moving laterally along the vocal tract and that's ?l?. Finishing off our manner of articulation, we have our approximants. There are three approximants and I'll get to those shortly. The reason they're called approximants is because basically our vocal organs are approximately in the middle of our mouth. The big factor here is that there isn't any audible friction. Air is moving freely but the vocal organs are not close enough together to create audible friction. These sounds include ?w?. The place of articulation is in the front however the matter of articulation we have our tongue approximately in the middle of our mouth not causing any vibration with any other vocal organs and in order to produce the sound ?w?. Next we have our R sound or our ?r? sound. Again, there isn't any audible friction within our vocal tract here and it's a very difficult sound to produce. It's very close to the lateral sound but the key differentiation here is that our tongue is not touching our alveolar ridge. It's approximately in the middle of our mouth. One more time that's ?r?. Finally, we have our ?y? sound and ?y? again is just approximately in the middle there it's not causing any audible friction it's ?y?.
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