Chapter 4: Phonemes and Allophones

A phoneme is

a basic unit of a language’s phonology
It’s the smallest sound segment that is combined with other phonemes to form meaningful units.

Segmental phonemes have __ sound segments (vowel and consonant sounds)

44

Supra-segmental phonemes are

stress, pitch, intonation,..

The allophone is

phonetic realizations of the same phonemes in different distributions. Ex: /p/ in pin and spin

Vowels at the end of a word are___

long

Vowels followed by voiceless consonants are ____ than those followed by voiced consonants

shorter

Aspiration is

a little extra puff of air going with speech sounds

Aspiration occurs with___

voiceless plosives /p t k/

____ /p/ /t/ /k/ of a stressed syllable are aspirated

Initial

The approximants /r/ /j/ /w/ and /l/ become devoiced/voiceless when

Fortis plosives ( /p/ /t/ /k/ ) + /r, j, w, l/

Ex: train - rain, queen-win (/kwi:n/ /win/ )

Velarization (palatalization) is

Secondary articulation of consonants by which back of tongue is raised toward the velum during articulation of consonant

Lateral /l/ becomes velarized when

/a vowel/ + /l/ + /a consonant/: film, help
/a vowel/ + final /l/: file, boil

Syllabic consonants stand as

the center of a syllable instead of a vowel (i.e a syllable without a vowel âm không cần nguyên âm)

Alveolar /n/ becomes syllabic when

/a plosive or fricative/ + final /n/
Listen - Threaten

Lateral /l/ becomes syllabic when

A consonant + final /l/
bottle - castle

A sound segment formed by a peak (normally a vowel) and its surrounding sounds (usually a consonant)

A syllable

A very important unit in speech, longer than a sound, smaller than a whole word

A syllable

A syllable can form

a word, a part of a word

Those which end in a vowel, as in try, show, shoe,…

Open syllable

Those which are followed by a consonant, as in bet, ask, stop,…

closed syllables\

If two vowels adjoin in a word,

the syllable break is between the vowels

If one consonant occurs between two vowels,

the syllable break is between the first vowel and the consonant

If one consonant occurs between a strong vowel and a weak vowel,

the consonant belongs to the syllable with the strong vowel

If one consonant occurs between 2 weak vowels,

the consonant belongs to the syllable of the second weak vowel

If a consonant cluster occurs between 2 vowels,

syllable division depends on type of consonant cluster

If the cluster is a type that can occur at the beginning of a word and the following vowel is a trong one

the cluster belongs to the syllable with the strong vowel

If the second vowel is weak,

the first consonant of the cluster usually goes in the syllable with the first vowel

If the consonant cluster is not a word-initial type,

the second syllable starts with a consonant or a consonant cluster that can ve word-initial