 Here are our recommendations for the in-class meeting dealing with suprasegmental features. The title of the respective e-lecture is Phonetics suprasegmental features. As usual you should start with the definition of your central goals. So first of all in this particular case I would recommend that you go through all the topics you've dealt with up to this point with your students. Then you should define the differences between segmental and suprasegmental phonetics. Do some ear training with your students again and finally please don't forget secondary articulation because this is a suprasegmental feature too. Before you start with the practical as usual about 25% or so of the in-class time should be reserved for questions that the students might want to ask about the virtual session, about the e-lecture or the workbook content. The questions for example could be what are the basic segments of speech. They should be collected for future classes and for optional revisions of the online content. Since this is the first session on suprasegmental features it is advisable to develop a list of topics in cooperation with the students about what they should know at this point in the class or if you use this unit in isolation what they should know prior to this class. So far all students should understand how the field of phonetics is subdivided. Let me exemplify this with a short question and answering part with one of my first term students Katrin Dilman. So here is Katrin. Hello. So hi Katrin. Katrin do you remember the three main sub branches of phonetics? They all start with a small letter A. Yeah I do. There is first articulatory. Okay. Articulatory phonetics. Articulatory yes. Auditory. Auditory phonetics. And acoustic phonetics. Acoustic phonetics. Okay and alternatively there's also a possibility of labelling them with three Ps. Yeah we can say production. Okay the production of speech. The perception of speech. Okay good. And physics. Great. So this is what your students should know up to this point in time and the students should have an understanding of the basics of speech anatomy of airstream mechanisms so that terms like pharyngeal does that ring a bell? Yeah it does. Good and I know she knows what it is. Alveola or pulmonic airstreams are no longer unknown terms to them. So you could ask for example the question what type of airstream is involved in all segments of speech? The pulmonic airstream. Good. Or you could ask your students something like do you know any non pulmonic airstreams? I know two more. There's for example the velaric airstream as in ejectives and in implosives and the glottalic airstream which we use mainly in clicks. Okay great. So once this part and this general part has been finished the discussion of suprasegmental aspects can start. To introduce the differences between segmental and suprasegmental features a parallel with music might be very helpful. Do you play a musical instrument Katrin? Yes I do. I play the clarinet. Okay great that could be of wonderful help here if you play a musical instrument you have some basic understanding. So I can ask her the question what are the basic segments in music? Well the notes. The notes okay so let's move some notes into my staves here. So what a great melody this will be. Fantastic composers you might say in the end. Well just random. So these are some notes on the staves and now in looking at the notes we can ask the next question what sort of effects can we produce in music that affect more than one note? For example we can make the notes loud or we can make the notes soft. Okay and there are some symbols used for loud and soft? For loud it is an F for forte or a P for piano. Piano. And if I want to apply this to several segments you can use diminuendo which is as far as I think this sort of symbol. Yep it is and crescendo. The opposite. Okay is there any other effect than a change of loudness in music? Well for example you can make the notes longer. Okay and what do I have to do then? You have to add a dot. A dot okay so somewhere a dot is added so these are now long notes. There's in fact there's there's a rule how much longer they are if I add a dot. 50% longer. Okay so this is a rule in music or we can also I remember another one we can link notes. Do you know what this is called if we if we link notes? That's called legato. Okay again a suprasegmental effect in music. So we have effects such as lengthening, linking, loudness effects and of course we can use notes with different tone height so we have things like C, D, E, F, G, R, C something like that. That was German by the way so it's not too bad you learn a little bit of German at least the letters. So on many instruments we have tones just separate tones on some instruments we can even glide the tones into one another like on a violin. Okay so this is what we know about music. What are the basic segments of speech? The consonants and vowels. Okay so this is then the equivalent of the notes in music and now all we have to sort out is that we have to find the equivalents of forte, piano, crescendo, diminuendo and so on in human speech then we have the suprasegmental effects. So this is where we are at the moment. Basic segments of speech and we need suprasegmental features. Let's look at the first one loudness. Now what is the physical counterpart of loudness? It's intensity. Physics intensity and how is it measured? In decibel. In decibels okay. All right so let's illustrate this. Here is a word an artificial nonsense word which could be pronounced something like kor, ta, mi, tun and now I produce each syllable in the same level same height, same length and so on and if I want to make one syllable stick out from the rest on the basis of loudness I would say something like kor, ta, mi, tun and which one did I emphasize? The ta it's much louder. The ta the second one so this one but of course as you know this is a little bit artificial so normally we don't do this in real speech. Okay let's take the next one the next effect pitch. The physical counterpart of pitch cutting? Frequency. Frequency okay. And it can be measured in Hertz. In Hertz very good. Okay now at this point as a teacher you can make an x-course into frequency analysis if you have time of course. Explain to your students terms like frequency, amplitude, oscillation and maybe Hertz. So once you have done this you can return to your word again here it is kor, ta, mi, tun and now I want to apply a different pitch to one of the syllables so let's do it kor, ta, mi, tun the third one the mi. The third one I sound like someone in church don't I? A bit. Okay all right so both effects loudness and pitch are of course totally unnatural. Normally to make a syllable stick out from the rest loudness and pitch movement go hand in hand and instead of marking the syllable by means of an underline we use a different symbol in phonetics but do you know which one? The apostrophe. We use an apostrophe and the apostrophe is then a symbol that combines loudness and length into what is cumulatively called stress and this can be accompanied by length effects. Now this is the third suprasegmental feature and the physical counterpart it's duration okay so physical duration how do we measure it and seconds well in speech rather than milliseconds okay milliseconds because we speak so fast again our word and now you see I spread the syllables out a little bit kor, ta, mi, tun and how do we mark length with a dot with two dots two dots okay so with a colon so this would be then kor, ta, mi, tun could we make consonants longer for example the last consonant in the first syllable can you do that kor, ta, mi, tun very good not many people can do that but you can okay so this is the effect of length right having done all this I think I would now do some ear training with the students and perhaps first of all apply to stress so let us combine our knowledge now you can use your workbooks you can use your notes and I will pronounce some words and then students have to write them down indicating the syllable that sticks out from the rest so words could be something like this nonsense words of course something like pemptomik, pemptomik the second one could be something like marschthenel, marschthenel and the third one projkast, projkast, projkast once you're ready you show the solution well here it is pemptomik, marschthenel and projkast now the students can compare their solution with the model solution and you can do the same thing in English now English nonsense words would be something like vuokrumptjes, vuokrumptjes, vuokrumptjes or battenheimer, battenheimer, battenheimer and here is the solution the English solution and again you can compare your solution with the model solution again as you see and hopefully have heard stress is a combination of loudness pitch and length next ear training would be tone now we can apply pitch changes to the syllables now what would you suggest Kathleen what can we do now in order to train tone sufficiently uh well we could take a syllable and simply change the pitch on it okay so here could be a syllable ba, ba, ba, ba any sort of tone and now let's assume this is our level line and now we want to apply some tone so let's first of all apply a level tone to ba, ba very good and if you produce a rise ba good a fall, ba very good and these three tones are of course the register tone because they constitute the basic registers of tonal movement in natural language and now we can combine these tones and produce contour tones such as let's use another color here something like a fall rise ba or a rise fall ba and it's always a good idea if you produce these tones to a company with them with gestures like ba, ba then you find it much easier to produce these tones um but do we use tone in English yes I think we do but not systematically so tone in English let's produce the English flag here and discuss that we we use it but not systematically let us illustrate this um let me ask you a very nasty question what did you do last night I was out for dinner really now what do you think about my answer you don't sound very interested not at all what would it be had I said really you sound like you don't think that I would go out for dinner okay but I of course I know you you can go out for dinner so that's not the problem with my answer so this was just an illustration of an effect of using tone in English so now I suggest to use an example from the language index you can practice here with tone in chinese for example you can ask your students to read from transcription let's say they have to read the chinese version of the very big book and here is the result so the advantages you can compare transcription with your own pronunciation and the real pronunciation by a native speaker before we summarize we should not forget another suprasegmental effect namely secondary articulation here are the main types behind us they have all been explained in the workbook in the virtual session in the e-lecture so all you can do in class is possibly produce them practice them so let's do that the first one is called labialization now kathrin can you illustrate that to us labialization yes labialization labialization so it's some sort of lip rounding isn't it okay and then we have palatalization so you see the tongue in palette halalization approaches the palette by the way you find the phonetic description the diacritic on these diagrams then we have velarization velarization yes so your tongue was very high in the velar region and finally we have palatal but pharyngealization where the tongue is very much in the throat pharyngealization and you see the way i wrote all these words you take the place of articulation and adiization so that's quite simple okay now we should have understood the whole story we listed explained and exemplified all suprasegmental features we trained a lot with our students and we have achieved marvelous results kathrin how long have you been in our class um four weeks four weeks only and you know such a lot about phonetics well four weeks in four sessions that's enormous i hope you've been enjoying the class up to this point so i leave the final words up to you okay thank you i can say that although you have to learn quite a lot of theoretical stuff phonetics is really fun and interesting so bye bye