MTEL Speech cheat sheet

Speech: Foundations, Anatomy, and Speech Sound Production

• Respiration for speech is active expiration: the inspiratory muscles relax while internal intercostals and abdominal muscles contract to produce a steady, prolonged exhaled airstream; speech uses roughly 10-25% of vital capacity per breath group.

• Phonation occurs at the larynx: the vibrating vocal folds (thyroarytenoid muscle, the body of the fold) produce voice; the cricothyroid muscle lengthens and tenses the folds to raise pitch, while the posterior cricoarytenoid is the only abductor (opens the glottis).

• Bernoulli effect plus elastic recoil of the vocal folds supports the myoelastic-aerodynamic theory of phonation: airflow between the folds lowers pressure, drawing them together, and subglottal pressure blows them apart cyclically.

• The vocal tract filters the source: resonances (formants) are shaped by tongue height/advancement, jaw opening, lip rounding, and velopharyngeal closure; F1 correlates roughly with tongue height and F2 with tongue advancement.

• Consonants are classified by place (bilabial, labiodental, dental/lingua-alveolar, palatal, velar, glottal), manner (stop, fricative, affricate, nasal, liquid, glide), and voicing; English has six stop phonemes: /p b t d k g/.

• Vowels are classified by tongue height, tongue advancement, lip rounding, and tension; English monophthongs include /i ɪ eɪ ɛ æ ɑ ɔ oʊ ʊ u ʌ ə ɝ/ as realized in General American, with diphthongs /aɪ aʊ ɔɪ/.

• Phonological processes in young children include reduplication, final consonant deletion, cluster reduction, stopping, fronting, gliding, and weak syllable deletion; most are suppressed by age 4-5, so persistence beyond expected ages signals disorder.

• Speech sound disorders divide into articulation (motor production of individual sounds) and phonological (rule-based pattern errors affecting sound classes); assessment contrasts spontaneous speech, single-word naming, and stimulability testing.

• The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) provides one symbol per phoneme; broad transcription uses slashes / / for phonemes and brackets [ ] for narrow, allophonic detail such as aspiration of voiceless stops in initial position.