Chapter 2: Linguistic Phonetics - Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms from the lecture notes on Linguistic Phonetics (Chapter 2).

Language

A socially shared code using arbitrary symbols and rule-governed combinations to represent ideas, thoughts, and feelings; has its own grammar that shapes sounds, word formation, and sentence structures.

Speech

The physical articulation and resulting acoustic signal produced by the vocal apparatus, which listeners perceive and understand.

Dialect

A regional or social variety of a language with variations in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.

Speech community

A group of people living in the same area who use the same language.

Idiolect

Each person’s unique form of spoken language, influenced by region, culture, social class, and personal experiences.

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful unit of language; builds words.

Free morpheme

A morpheme that can stand alone as a word (e.g., cat, ball, walk).

Bound morpheme

A morpheme that must attach to another morpheme; all affixes are bound.

Prefix

An affix attached to the beginning of a stem.

Suffix

An affix attached to the end of a stem.

Derivational affix

An affix that creates a new word or changes the grammatical category of a word (e.g., un-, mis-, -ful, -ly).

Inflectional affix

An affix that marks grammatical function without changing meaning or category (e.g., -s, -’s, -ed, -en, -ing, -er, -est).

Lexicon

The mental dictionary of morphemes and words; part of the grammar a speaker has learned.

Morphology

The part of grammar that contains rules for word formation.

Morphemic transcription

A written record of the morphemic content of an utterance (e.g., restlessness = rest + less + ness).

Phoneme

The basic sound segment that can distinguish meaning; a mental category within a language’s sound system.

Minimal pair

Two words that differ by one phoneme, revealing distinct phonemes (e.g., pay vs bay).

Phone

A physical realization of a phoneme; an actual speech sound.

Allophone

A phonetic realization of a phoneme that does not change meaning; variation in realization in different contexts.

IPA

The International Phonetic Alphabet, a standardized system to represent sounds of all languages.

Allographs

Different graphemes that represent the same phoneme (e.g., sh, s, ss).

Digraph

A pair of letters that represent a single sound (e.g., sh, ch, ph).

Silent letters

Letters in a word that are not pronounced (e.g., bomb, knee, could).

Orthography

The system of written spelling for a language; not always directly aligned with pronunciation.

Phonetic transcription

Notation of speech sounds using symbols (often IPA) or brackets to show actual sounds.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

A standardized set of symbols to represent sounds of all spoken languages; includes diacritics for variation.

Extensions to the IPA

Additional symbols adopted to apply IPA to disordered speech.

Syllable

A unit of speech consisting of a nucleus with optional onset and coda; used to construct words.

Nucleus

The core of a syllable, usually a vowel; a syllabic consonant can also serve as nucleus.

Onset

Consonant(s) before the nucleus in a syllable.

Coda

Consonant(s) after the nucleus in a syllable.

Rhyme (Rime)

The nucleus plus any coda of a syllable; the portion of a syllable that forms a rhyme.

Open syllable

A syllable that ends with a vowel.

Closed syllable

A syllable that ends with a consonant.

Monosyllabic

A word that contains one syllable.

Disyllabic

A word that contains two syllables.

Polysyllabic

A word that contains three or more syllables.

Initial

Position at the beginning of a unit (syllable or word).

Medial

Position in the middle of a unit (syllable or word).

Final

Position at the end of a unit (syllable or word).

Prevocalic

Position before the vowel within a syllable.

Postvocalic

Position after the vowel within a syllable.

Intervocalic

Position between two vowels.

Phonetics

The study of the physical aspects of speech sounds: articulatory, acoustic, and auditory.

Phonology

The study of how sounds are systematically organized in a language; includes phoneme inventories and allophones; language-specific.