1. Articulators (vocal organs or speech organs) are organs involved in the production of speech sounds. What are active articulators and what are passive articulators? Name four of each of them.
2. How can we determine whether a single speech sound is a phoneme or not?
3. The sound [b] in the English word bin, e.g. is an unaspirated voiced vowel. Influenced by local dialects, people in different areas of China may pronounce the word somewhat differently. Suppose a Pekingese pronounced the word as “宾” (bin) / [pɪn] and a native of Shanghai pronounced it as “贫” (pin) / [bhɪn]. Both of them then made pronunciation errors. But were their errors of the same type? If not, what kind of errors did they make respectively? And which error was a more grave one?
4. Use examples to illustrate how suprasegmental features can affect the meaning or function of utterances in discourse.