Speech sounds

Speech sounds

Also called phones - physical speech sounds

Phonemes

1. abstract minimal sound units of a particular language

2. distinctive sound units which represent an underlying difference

3. language-specific clusterings of distinctive features

4. in minimal pairs: if replacing one sound by another results in a different word, then the two sounds represent different phonemes and the two words form a minimal pair

5. homograph minimal pairs: when two words are spelt the same but their phonemes are different (lead vs. lead)

6. misleading spelling differences: sometimes the spelling suggests that there is more than one difference, but in pronunciation only one phoneme is different (cold vs. called)

7. homophones: when two words are spelt differently but pronounced exactly the same (meat vs. meet)

8. Phonemic Principle: every language has a limited set of phonemes (= phoneme inventory), and every word in the language consists solely of phonemes of that language

Allophones

1. Realisations of the same phoneme

2. they are in complementary distribution: if two language elements occur in mutually exclusive environments, then they are in complementary distribution = sounds in complementary distribution can’t contrast + no minimal pairs ever

3. Allophonic Principle:

• phonemes may vary; they may have more than one allophone

• the variation is predictable, rule-governed based on the position of the sound

4. Free variation - occurs when two or more linguistic forms can be used interchangeably in the same context without changing meaning or grammaticality; there is no functional difference

Distribution

1. It is the set of a list of all environments of a sound segment

2. Distribution of a sound - the sum of those environments in which a sound can occur; there are some positions where a sound never occurs

Phonemic similarity

It refers to the sounds that share most phonetic features

Alternation

1. the phenomenon where a linguistic unit (sound, morpheme, or syntactic structure) varies predictably depending on its phonological, morphological, or syntactic environment

2. Conditioned by the phonological environment

3. Vowel-length alternation/ Allophonic alternation

4. Morpheme alternation - systematic variation in the pronunciation of certain specific morphemes

Neutralisation

1. These are phonological processes or rules that obliterate the contrast between two phonemes in certain environments

2. in some dialects of English, /t/ and /d/ are both pronounced as voiced flaps between vowels (writer, rider), thus neutralising the voicing distinction so that the two words sound alike