Intro to tutorial section

Consonants Vowels Dipthongs Glossary Tutorials consonants vowels Home	The English Phonetic Alphabet
		What is the EPA
			Welcome to the tutorial of the English Phonetic Alphabet (EPA) website. The EPA is a series of charts that communicate how human speech sounds (known as phonemes) are produced in the vocal tract. This tutorial is intended to familiarize you with the system that linguists use to describe what physically happens when a phoneme is formed. Once you understand some of the basic principles of articulatory phonetics, reading the charts will be a much easier task. Each phoneme in the chart is linked to another page that gives a more detailed phonemic description of how the sound is produced. The following information is contained on the individual phoneme pages: Phonetic description of the sound. Recording of the phoneme spoken. Recording of the phoneme spoken within a word. Spectrograph Image of the sound and the word. Animation of the oral cavity producing the sound.
			The columns and rows that surround the EPA Chart contain information about the features that linguists use to describe speech sounds. A glossary is also available to explain some of these listed features; simply click on a feature to see its glossary description. Because there are two distinct classes of phonemes, consonants and vowels, there are two separate charts to describe how the phonemes are articulated. Phoneticians use three features to describe how consonants are formed and use four features to describe vowels.