31 Summary

You have now had a good deal of practice at transcribing words and sentences in Canadian English, including the salient phonetic details for narrow IPA transcription of English. You’re starting to see that there can be variability in how a given segment is pronounced, even if it gets represented with a single IPA symbol. Articulatory processes play a sizeable role in how speech sounds vary, and suprasegmental information contributes to variability as well. In the next chapter, we’ll see how the mind responds to the variability that our articulators produce.