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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