Phonology and Speech Sound Acquisition Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering core concepts, phonetic classifications, developmental stages, and phonological processes from the speech acquisition lecture.

Phonology

The study of the sounds of spoken language.

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound in spoken language.

Allophone

A sound variation of a phoneme that changes depending on its position within a word (e.g., the /p/ sound in 'top' versus 'stop').

Bilabial

A place of articulation produced using both lips, such as /p/, /b/, and /m/.

Labiodental

A place of articulation produced using the lips and teeth, such as /f/ and /v/.

Alveolar

A place of articulation produced with the tongue placed against the alveolar ridge behind the front teeth, such as /s/, /z/, /n/, /l/, /d/, and /t/.

Stop (Plosive)

A manner of articulation where the vocal tract completely closes so no air escapes, followed by a sudden release or burst of air.

Fricative

A manner of articulation where a narrow opening is created in the vocal tract and air is forced through, generating friction or a hissing sound.

Affricate

A manner of articulation that starts as a stop sound and is then released as a fricative (e.g., /ch/ in chair, /j/ in jam).

Coarticulation

The process by which one speech sound changes or overlaps with an adjacent sound in continuous speech to save time and energy.

Prosody

The suprasegmental features of speech, including stress, pitch, rhythm, intonation, and duration.

Vowel Quadrilateral

A diagrammatic chart used to classify American English vowels based on tongue height (high, mid, low) and tongue advancement (front, central, back).

Diphthong

A vowel sound produced by gliding from an initial vowel position (onglide) to a secondary vowel position (offglide) within the same syllable.

General Order of Phoneme Acquisition

The rule-based developmental progression of speech sound acquisition categorized by Place of Articulation (Labials -> Alveolars -> Velars -> Dentals -> Palatals) and Word Position (Initial -> Final -> Clusters -> Across Words).

Consonant Classification Chart

A standardized grid categorizing consonant speech sounds by Place of Articulation, Manner of Articulation, and Voicing (Voiceless vs. Voiced).

Marginal Babbling

Early vocalization emerging during the Expansion stage (4-6 months) where an infant loosely combines vowels and consonants.

Reduplicated Babbling

A characteristic of Canonical Babbling (6-10 months) where an infant repeats long strings of identical syllables, such as 'bababa' or 'mamama'.

Variegated Babbling

Babbling emerging around 10-12 months that involves mixing different consonant and vowel combinations within a string, such as 'baguda'.

Jargon

Pre-linguistic babbling occurring around 10-12 months that mimics real conversation using adult-like rhythm, intonation, and pitch patterns.

Protoword

An invented word unique to a child that is used consistently to refer to a specific object during the 13-15 month developmental stage.

Holophrastic Stage

A stage of speech production (15-18 months) where single true words accompanied by gestures represent entire sentences or ideas.

Word Explosion

A period of rapid vocabulary acceleration between 18-24 months where a toddler accumulates several hundred words and begins producing true 2-word combinations.

Segmentation

The speech perception problem where infants must determine where individual words begin and end within a continuous stream of speech.

Perceptual Constancy

The ability of an infant to recognize identical sounds or words across different talkers, pitches, environments, or acoustic conditions.

Generative Analysis of Developing Speech

An analytical perspective evaluating speech errors based on what the child intended to say rather than actual production, treating errors as rule-based mental patterns.

Whole-Word Processes

Earlier-stage phonological simplification processes that affect larger components of a word or its syllable structure (e.g., unstressed syllable deletion, final consonant deletion, reduplication).

Segment-Change Processes

Later-stage phonological simplification processes that alter individual consonants or sound segments (e.g., velar fronting, fricative stopping, liquid gliding).

Velar Fronting

A segment-change phonological process where a back sound like /k/ or /g/ is replaced by a front sound like /t/ or /d/ (e.g., cat -> tat).

Liquid Gliding

A segment-change phonological process where a liquid consonant (/l/ or /r/) is replaced by a glide sound (/w/ or /j/), such as pronouncing 'red' as 'wed'.