Phonetics and Phonology Concepts

Flashcards summarizing key concepts from phonetics and phonology as discussed in the lecture notes.

Phonetics

The study of sounds in speech (i.e. phones).

Phonology

The study of sound patterns that create meanings.

Phoneme

An abstract contrastive phonological unit whose phonetic realisations are predictable.

Phone

A particular realisation (pronunciation) of a phoneme, not causing changes in meaning.

Allophone

A predictable phonetic realisation of a phoneme, which does not change meaning when substituted.

Phonemic transcription

Broad transcription, represents only the phonemes without detailed speech production.

Phonetic transcription

Narrow transcription, transcribes the phonetic detail about production of individual phones.

Minimal pair

Two separate words that are identical except for one sound segment in the same position.

Distinctive feature

A phonetic property of a phoneme that allows it to contrast meanings of words.

Complementary distribution

When allophones do not occur in the same phonetic environment.