Phonetics & Phonology Vocabulary

Flashcards for Phonetics and Phonology review.

Phonetics

The study of speech sounds, focusing on their physical properties.

directly observed , not particular language

Phonology

The study of the sound system of a language and the contrastive sounds. Speaker’s head

studied indirectly, specific language

Phoneme

The smallest meaning-distinguishing unit in a language.

Allophone

A variant form of a phoneme.

Phones that are realizations of the same phoneme – with regard to their phonological status.

Vowel Quadrilateral

Representing the mouth shape and tongue position in cross-section.

Monophthongs

Vowels that remain relatively unchanged during production.

Diphthongs

Vowels that change during production.

Monophthongs are sometimes labelled:

Pure Vowels

Closing Diphthongs

Diphthongs where the articulation moves from a lower vowel to a higher vowel.

[ eɪ, aɪ, ɔɪ ] [ aʊ, o/ǝʊ ]

Centering Diphthongs

Diphthongs where the articulation moves from a higher vowel to a lower vowel. [ ɪǝ, eǝ, ʊǝ ]

phonetic properties

• contrastive

• non-contrastive

Non-contrastive(phonetic properties)

Those that provide more detailed description of sound but do not distinguish one sound (or word) from another

Contrastive(phonetic properties)

Those that distinguish one sound from another

• When two words contrast (have different meanings) with only one distinctive sound, we call this a minimal pair

Allophones

sounds whose description includes 1 or more non-distinctive properties. These are variant forms of a phoneme, e.g. [th] and [t̪]

Phones that are realizations of the same phoneme – with

regard to their phonological status.

Phonemes

defined by distinctive phonetic properties

(aka features), e.g. /t/ and/p/ (differ: place of articulation; share: manner, voice, aspiration, etc.)

Phone

Actual speech sound; smallest sound segment in a stream of speech without regard to its possible phonological status.

[p] voiceless bilabial plosive

Phonemic transcription:

transcribe the presumed underlying representations of sounds (the speaker’s stored mental idea). What you find in a dictionary.

Phonetic transcription:

real-life detailed transcription< it shows lik person talk according to their accent dialect

Diacritics

small marks or sylables that added to letters or phonetics symbles E.g.

Minimal Pair Test

A method used in phonetics to identify contrasting phonemes in a language by comparing pairs of words that differ by only a single sound. The results help determine which sounds are phonemic in a given language.

Contrastive Distribution

two or more sounds that occur in identical environments and for which at least one minimal pair can be found

/p/ vs. /b/

• pat → /pæt/

• bat → /bæt/

🔁 Swapping /p/ and /b/ changes the meaning → so they are in contrastive distribution.

➡ Therefore, /p/ and /b/ are different phonemes in English.

Complementary Distribution

Phones never occur in identical environments

Example (English): [pʰ] vs. [p]

These are both versions of the phoneme /p/.

• [pʰ] → aspirated, with a puff of air

  • Occurs at the beginning of a stressed syllable:

    • pin → [pʰɪn]

• [p] → unaspirated

  • Occurs after /s/:

    • spin → [spɪn]

🔄 You can’t swap them — saying [spʰɪn] sounds odd or foreign, but it doesn’t change the word into something new.

“free variation”

contrasts are suspended in specific words

“either” [iðɚ] vs [ɑɪðɚ]

 ”booth” [buθ] vs [buf]

Phonotactics

refer to rules in a language about how sounds can be arranged in words

1. Start of a word:

   • ✅ /st/ as in "stop" → allowed

   • ❌ /tl/ — tlip is not a possible English word

2. End of a word:

   • ✅ /ŋ/ as in "sing" → allowed

   • ❌ /h/ — sih (with /h/ at the end) is not allowed in English

3. Vowel patterns:

   • English allows consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) patterns like "cat" /kæt/

   • Some languages (like Hawaiian) might not allow words to end in a consonant at all

Phonotactic Rules

Based on position within a word (mainly consonants)

Based on the structure of a syllable