Human Language Test 1 Flashcards

linguistics

The scientific study of language.

language

An abstract cognitive system unique to humans for producing and comprehending utterances.

Prescriptivism

rules of “proper” language

Descriptivism

describes what speakers actually do.

 three branches of phonetics

 Articulatory, acoustic, auditory.

three main features of consonants

Voicing, place of articulation, manner of articulation

four features of vowels?

Height, backness, rounding, tenseness

minimal units of language

Speech sounds (studied in phonetics

phonology

The study of sound systems of a language

phoneme

An abstract sound category, unpredictable, stored in the lexicon.

allophone

Predictable realization of a phoneme in speech.

How phonemes and allophones written

Phoneme = /slashes/; Allophone = [brackets]

example of English /t/ allophones

[tʰ] (top), [t] (stop), [ɾ] (butter)

phonological rule

A formal statement describing predictable sound changes.

Example of a phonological rule for /t/

/t/ → [ɾ] between vowels.

phonetic environment

The sounds surrounding a target sound.

Complementary distribution

Sounds never occur in the same environment; allophones of same phoneme

Contrastive distribution

Sounds occur in same environment and change meaning → separate phonemes.

Overlapping distribution

Sounds occur in same environments; not necessarily contrastive.

Free variation

Two sounds can occur in the same place without changing meaning.

Example of contrastive sounds in English

[p] vs. [b] → “pat” vs. “bat.

Example of complementary distribution in English

[pʰ] vs. [p] in “pin” vs. “spin.

Example of free variation in English

 “Economics” with [ɛ] or [i].

What a minimal pair show

Contrastive distribution → different phonemes

If two sounds are predictable, what are they?

Allophones of the same phoneme.

indicates overlapping distribution

 Sounds appear in same environment without meaning difference.

Features of [p]

Voiceless bilabial stop

Features of [b]

Voiced bilabial stop.

Features of [i]

 High front unrounded tense vowel.

 Features of [u]

High back rounded tense vowel

What feature distinguishes [i] vs. [ɪ]

Tenseness (tense vs. lax