AIR STREAM MECHANISMS
All speech sounds are made by making air move. Usually the air is moved outwards from the body, creating an egressive airstream; more rarely speech sounds are made by drawing air into the body - an ingressive airstream. The most common way of moving air is by compression of the lungs so that the air is expelled through the vocal tract. This is called a pulmonic airstream (usually an egressive pulmonic one, but occasionally speech is produced while breathing in). Others are the glottalic (produced by the larynx, with closed vocal folds; it is moved up and down like the plunger of a bicycle pump) and the velaric (where the back of the tongue is pressed against the soft palate, or velum, making an air-tight seal, and then drawn backwards or forwards to produce an airstream). Ingressive glottalic consonants (often called implosives) and egressive ones (ejectives) are found in many non-European languages; click sounds (ingressive velaric) are much rarer, but occur in a number of southern African languages such as Hottentot, Xhosa and Zulu. Speakers of other languages, including English, use click sounds for non-linguistic communication, as in the case of the "tut-tut" (American "tsk-tsk") sound of disapproval.
All speech sounds are made by making air move. Usually the air is moved outwards from the body, creating an egressive airstream; more rarely speech sounds are made by drawing air into the body - an ingressive airstream. The most common way of moving air is by compression of the lungs so that the air is expelled through the vocal tract. This is called a pulmonic airstream (usually an egressive pulmonic one, but occasionally speech is produced while breathing in). Others are the glottalic (produced by the larynx, with closed vocal folds; it is moved up and down like the plunger of a bicycle pump) and the velaric (where the back of the tongue is pressed against the soft palate, or velum, making an air-tight seal, and then drawn backwards or forwards to produce an airstream). Ingressive glottalic consonants (often called implosives) and egressive ones (ejectives) are found in many non-European languages; click sounds (ingressive velaric) are much rarer, but occur in a number of southern African languages such as Hottentot, Xhosa and Zulu. Speakers of other languages, including English, use click sounds for non-linguistic communication, as in the case of the "tut-tut" (American "tsk-tsk") sound of disapproval.
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