ENGLISH CENTRAL VOWEL SOUNDS

ENGLISH CENTRAL VOWEL SOUNDS

The central vowel is produced when the tongue is resting in a neutral position in the oral cavity.

There are for central vowel sounds but they are represented by four symbols ([ᴧ], [ә], [ɝ], [ɚ]). The symbol used depends on whether or not the syllable with the central vowel sound is stressed or not.

Stress refers to the emphasis you place on a particular syllable in a word when you pronounce it.

1. FEATURE:

[ᴧ]: A lax, short, unrounded central vowel. It is found in words like under [ʌndɚ] and luck [ lʌk]. It is a stressed vowel.It appears in the beginning and middle of words. There are no words that end in this sound.It is low-mid, stressed vowel sound.

[ә]: A lax, short, unrounded central vowel. It is produced like the sound [ʌ] but can represent any unstressed vowel sound in a word such as apart [əpɑrt] and parade [pəred].It can appear in all positions of word and can even be occur multiple times in the same word.It is low, mid-central, unstressed vowel sound.

[ɝ]: It is a long, mid-central, stressed vowelsound, rounded, with r-coloring. It is typically acoustically more intense, has a higher fundamental frequency, and has a longer duration when it is compared to a similar unstressed vowel such as [ɚ].

It can appear in the stressed syllables of words at beginning and middle of multiple syllable words but never at the end and only appears as an ending sound in single syllable, stressed words.

[ɚ]: A long, unstressed sound that is a combination of any unstressed vowel [ə] and the [r] sound in English. Production is the same as the [ɝ] sound only difference is stress. It is found in words such as other [ʌðɚ] and perhaps [pɚhæps].

It appears in the middle and end of words when the syllable is unstressed and never in the beginning.It is a mid-central, unstressed sound.

2. SPEECH ORGANS

In order to know how to produce the various sounds of English correctly, you must be familiar with the speech organs that are used to produce them.

The English speech sounds are produced with the help of different organs or parts of the mouth. These are lips, teeth, teeth ridge, tongue, the roof of the mouth cavity (consisting of the hardpalate and the soft palate at the back), uvula (the soft hanging part at the extreme end of the roof of the mouth), vocal cords (two muscle strips placed horizontally at the top of the wind pipe).

Speech Organs

Some of the organs which you see in the above figure can move (the tongue, lower jaw, soft palate,uvula, lips and vocal cords) while some are fixed (upper jaw, hard palate and teeth ridge). Whenyou speak, you can change the position of the movable organs to produce different sounds.

Sounds are produced when you breathe out air from the lungs and this air stream is modified by the movable speech organs.

Production of vowel sounds

For producing the vowel sounds you have to keep two things in mind:

a. The shape of the lips and

b. The part of the tongue raised

The shape of the lips.

The shape of the lips changes while producing different vowels. Thebasic shapes are:

Spread Rounded Neutral.

The parts of the tongue:

For producing different vowel sounds, the front, centre and back of the tongue move forward, backward, up or down.

Will refer to both these things and the other speech organs while describing the central vowel sounds occur:

[ᴧ] and [ә]

1) The tongue is in the center of the oral cavity.

2) The

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