siden

Ear drum Also called the tympanum The membrane which separates the outer ear from the middle ear. Sound waves impinging on the ear drum cause it to vibrate. The vibrations are transmitted via the small bones of the middle ear to the cochlea.

Echo question A question which is a repetition of another's question uttered for the purpose of checking that the question is relevant, or that the speaker has heard the question correctly.

Eclipsis [ɪˈklɪpsɪs] The traditional name of one of the initial consonant mutations of Irish. It affects only word-initial plosives and [f] in certain environments, for instance after plural possessive adjectives and after certain numbers. [f] is replaced by [v], voiceless plosives are replaced by homorganic voiced plosives and voiced plosives by homorganic voiced nasals. Furthermore, words beginning with a vowel gain an [n] prefix. The original consonant letter remains in the spelling and is preceded by a letter or letters representing the replacement sound. Examples are: capall (horse) [ˈkapəɫ] , seacht gcapall (seven horses) [ˈʃaxt ˈɡapəɫ]; doras (door) [ˈdɒrəs], ɑ ndoras (their door) [ə ˈnɒrəs]; fuinneog (window) [f^ɯiˈnʲoːɡ], bhur bhfuinneoɡ (your (plur) window) [vur v^ɯiˈnʲoːɡ]

Edge tone See boundary tone.

Egressive [ɪˈɡresɪv] A term applied to airstreams. An egressive airstream is one which moves from inside the vocal tract to the outside. Two egressive airstreams are used for speech sounds: pulmonic and glottalic.

Ejective [ɪˈdʒektɪv] A consonant sound made with an egressive glottalic (pharyngeal) airstream. Ejective consonants are all obstruents. Voiced ejectives are thought by many writers to be impossible. Ejectives are symbolised by placing an apostrophe after the symbol for a voiceless consonant symbol. Thus [kʼ] represents a velar ejective stop. Ejectives are found in contrast to pulmonic egressive sounds in languages of North and Central America, many languages in Africa and in Caucasian languages. Other languages often use ejectives as positional or stylistic variants of pulmonic egressive sounds. For instance, English speakers use [pʼ tʼ kʼ] in utterance final position in emphatic utterances such as Wait! [weɪtʼ]

. In American writings the term ejective is often replaced by the term glottalised.

Electropalatography See palatography.
Element Also called unary feature. A component of speech sounds in recent phonological theories. Elements, as opposed to binary features, do not have values, but are either present or absent from the specification of a sound. Elements may be subordinated to other elements. For example: [e] is specified as containing the two elements I and A, but with the latter subordinate to the former. [ɛ] contains the same two elements, but the former is subordinate to the latter. The elements used for vowel specification are: I: indicating palatality, A: indicating openness, U: indicating labiality and @: indicating centrality. The same elements are also used for consonant specification and are accompanied by others, such as ?: indicating stop, h: indicating friction, and R: indicating coronality.
Elision [ɪˈlɪʒn] (adj elided [ɪˈlaɪdɪd]) The deletion of a sound. There are two categories of elision:
1. synchronic, when a sound may be elided from a word or phrase in present day speech. An example of this from English is the phrase next month, which may be pronounced without elision: [nekst mʌnθ] or with the alveolar plosive elided: [neks mʌnθ].
2. diachronic or historical, where a sound which used to occur in a word or phrase is now permanently deleted. An example of this from English is the word listen, which is no longer pronounced with the alveolar plosive which the spelling suggests.
See also pseudo-elision.
Eng A name for the phonetic symbol [ŋ].
Environment (1) Part of a phonological rule, separated from the input and the output by the symbol /. The environment specifies under what circumstances the input is affected by the rule. (2) More generally, one of the phonetic or phonological contexts in which a sound may occur in a given language
Epenthesis [ɪˈpenθəsɪs] (adj. epenthetic [ˌepenˈθetɪk] ) The insertion of a segment internally in a word. An example from many forms of English is the epenthetic [t] segment found in many speakers' pronunciations of words containing the sequence [ns], for example prince pronounced as [prɪnts].
Epiglottis [ˌepɪˈɡlɒtɪs] (adj. epiglottal [ˌepɪˈɡlɒtl] ) A large flap of cartilage covered in mucous membrane, attached to the entrance of the larynx. There are three IPA symbols for epiglottal consonants: voiceless and voiced fricatives [ʜ] and [ʢ] and a plosive of unspecified voicing [ʡ]. One language reported to have the two fricatives is the Northeast Caucasian language Aghul.
Equal-loudness contour Perceived loudness of pure tones varies not only with sound pressure level but also with frequency. Broadly speaking, low frequency tones and high frequency tones need to have higher sound pressure levels than mid frequency tones in order to be perceived as loud. Loudness is measured in phons and curves can be plotted which show the relationship of frequency and sound pressure level for various phon values.
Esh A name for the phonetic symbol [ʃ].
Eustachian tube [juːˈsteɪʃn] A tube, approximately 35mm long in adult humans, which links the middle ear with the pharynx. The main functions of the tube are to drain mucus from the middle ear and to aid in pressure equalisation between the middle ear and the outside world.
EVAL [iˈvæl] (Short for Evaluator) A function in Optimality Theory which evaluates competing output forms against a hierarchy of universally valid constraints. See also GEN
Event sentence A sentence type which in English does not display the usual correlation between broad focus and unmarked tonicity. Event sentences consist of a lexically filled noun phrase followed by a verb without a complement. An example is: My button's come off. In a broad focus context this sentence would normally be said with the intonation nucleus on button.
ExtIPA An extension to the International Phonetic Alphabet to provide symbols for transcribing disordered speech.

Extrametricality The situation where a syllable is ignored by a rule which assigns lexical stress. For example, part of the main stress rule in English (stated informally) specifies that the main lexical stress falls on the final syllable if it is heavy or on the penultimate syllable if the final syllable is light (see syllable weight for an explanation of these concepts). This is true for many verbs and adjectives (but there are many exceptions). The situation for many nouns is different. The final syllable is ignored by the rule and the main stress falls one syllable earlier.
Extrasyllabicity The situation where a word-final consonant is ignored by the syllabification rules of a language.
Extrinsic allophone An allophone of a phoneme which cannot be explained simply by reference to phonetic features of the environment in which it appears. An example is the velarised allophone [ɫ] of the /l/ phoneme in many accents of English. This appears in all environments except immediately before a vowel or [j]. There is nothing common in the environments in which it does occur which could explain the velarisation. See also intrinsic allophone.