A couple of years ago I wrote a post reminiscing about cued articulation - a series of hand shapes that are used to teach children the differences between sounds:
The cool thing now is that I realise the relationship between them that I never noticed before - to make a 'b’ you use the same handshape as 'p’, but with two fingers on the top, because it’s the voiced equivalent. It’s the same for s/z, k/g and f/v if I remember correctly. Unfortunately I can’t find a decent chart on the internet to show them all to you.
Since then, I’ve found something better than a chart - I’ve found videos of people using the system. I’ve actually found quite a few, I think people have to, or want to, make these for their studies. Above is a short video from Svetlana Ava who goes through all the consonants and vowels.
These hand shapes are designed specifically for English speaking children, particularly UK/Aus English spoken where the creator studied and worked.
Even if you’ve never studied phonetics before, you’ll noticed the relationship between the hand shapes and sounds. The voiced and unvoiced pair are made in the same place, with the voiced using two fingers instead of one. Fricatives and liquids involve more continued movement than stops, and nasals have no articulator movement.
Front vowels move forward, back vowels backwards. Rounded vowels involve a rounding of the hands, and the higher the vowel, the higher the position of the fingers in relation to the hand. Diphthongs move between the two target vowel hand shapes.
Speech Path Annie told me that some people give the system the punny nickname ‘cute articulation’.