What Does Aspiration Have to do with Speech?
What does aspiration have to do with speech? That is a good question! Aspiration has many different meanings. The word is always used as a noun but it has very different meanings.
- Having goals and ambitions
- Removing fluid or liquid
- Inhaling fluid or an object into the lungs
- Or in phonetics, articulation means using a puff of air to release certain sounds.
That is the definition I want to talk about today. Many languages fail to use this manner of speech in their native tongue. So when they speak American English, the component of speech is not present. When we make a speech sound we are changing the shape of the oral cavity and sending air through it. Sometimes, the air is completely unrestricted, sometimes it is partially obstructed or completely obstructed. The sounds that I am talking about today have airflow that is completely stopped by placing the tongue or lips in a certain position. When the airflow is stopped we hear a puff of air.
Listen for the puff as I say these sounds. I’ll exaggerate it a little.
/P, t, k/
Where problems arise with this type of sound is not being able to hear that puff of air. So, that the sound is UN-aspirated. If that is the case, the sound is very hard to hear or it sounds like another sound. Let me give you an example.
Pat
Top
Come
When they are pronounced without aspiration, they sound like bat, dob, gum
A lot of languages have difficulty with this puff of air on a least one of the aspirated consonants. Some languages have difficulty will all of the consonants listed above. See the list below of the 26 languages that struggle with this skill.
Arabic, Burmese, Catalan, Creole, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Ilokano, Indonesian, Italian, Malayalam, Polish, Portugese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Tagalog, Tamil, Urdu, Vietnamese, Yoruba. (from Foreign Accent Norms of American English for 40 of the World’s Languages by Arthur Compton, Ph.D., 1996 Carousel House.)
If you see your native tongue listed above, would you be interested in a lesson around this skill? I would love to know and would create one for you. Please complete the quick survey below.
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