Module 1 - Phonics

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering fundamental concepts, sub-branches, symbols, and rules introduced in the 'Introduction to Phonetics' lecture.

Phonetics

The study of the production and perception of speech sounds in the real world that can be directly measured.

Phonology

The study of sounds as part of a language system (or grammar) in the mind of the speaker and hearer.

Acoustic phonetics

The branch of phonetics that studies the acoustic properties of speech sounds.

Physiological phonetics

The branch of phonetics that studies the anatomy and physiology of speech production and perception.

Perceptual phonetics

The branch of phonetics that studies listeners' psychological response to speech sounds.

Clinical phonetics

The branch of phonetics that studies speech perception or production that differs from norms for the language.

Phonetic transcription

An attempt to record what was said as accurately as possible. Transcription is subject to perceptual bias on the part of the transcriber. Biases include: transcriber's pronunciation, knowledge of spelling, phonemes in transcriber's language or dialect.

Allographs

Different spellings of the same sound (for example, 'ph', 'gh', and 'f').

Graphemes

The distinctive letters or letter combinations that make up a written word.

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

A standardized writing system where each symbol represents exactly one speech sound, designed to transcribe the sounds of any language in the world. In other words, there is only one grapheme for each sound. To highlight that the IPA is being used, transcriptions of words and sounds are written between slashes (e.g. /fiz/ = “fees”) or brackets (e.g. [fiz]). A letter in quotation marks represents English spelling (e.g., “m” vs. /m/).

Phoneme

A distinctive speech sound in a language that can signal a difference in word meaning. (Ex: cough - 3, smooth - 4, why - 2)

Morpheme

The distinctive, smallest meaningful bits or units that make up a word.

Allophones

Different non-contrastive variants or realizations of the same phoneme.

Phone

A physical speech sound itself, without regard to its linguistic or phonemic function in a specific language.

Phonemic transcription

Also called broad transcription; a rough approximation focusing on distinctive sound contrasts, written between slashes / /.

Phonetic transcription (narrow)

Also called narrow transcription; a careful attempt to capture the actual physical sounds produced, written between brackets [ ].

Minimal pair

A pair of words that differ by just one phone, where replacing one phone with another results in a change of meaning.

Natural classes

Sets of speech sounds that share one or more articulatory characteristics or features.

English Consonant IPA Chart

A chart organizing English consonants by place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing (voiceless vs. voiced).

English Vowel IPA Diagram

A quadrilateral diagram representing English vowel sounds classified by tongue height (high, mid, low) and tongue advancement (front, central, back).