ENGL 111 Unit III: Phonetics and Phonology - Hearing Language: From Sound to Speech

Vocabulary flashcards covering core concepts in introductory phonetics, phonology, speech sound analysis, and orthography from ENGL 111 Unit III.

Phonetics

The systematic study of speech sounds as physical events, examining how speech is produced, the measurable properties of the sound signal, and how listeners receive and perceive speech.

Articulatory phonetics

The subfield of phonetics that studies the production of speech by the vocal organs, investigating the actions of the tongue, lips, vocal folds, and other articulators.

Acoustic phonetics

The subfield of phonetics that investigates the physical properties of the speech signal, such as frequency, duration, intensity, waveforms, and spectrograms.

Auditory phonetics

The subfield of phonetics concerned with the reception and perception of speech, specifically how a listener hears and discriminates speech sounds.

Descriptive phonetics

An approach in phonetics that systematically observes, describes, classifies, and represents speech sounds (for example, categorizing a sound by its place and manner of articulation).

Experimental phonetics

An approach in phonetics that studies speech through controlled observation and quantitative measurement, such as measuring acoustic properties, duration, or inspecting spectrograms across conditions.

Phonology

The study of how speech sounds and phonetic features are organized, patterned, and function within a language to create contrast and distinguish words and meanings.

Phoneme

A contrastive sound unit in a language that serves to distinguish one word from another.

Minimal pair

Two words that differ in only one sound segment in the same position and convey different meanings (such as 'pin' and 'bin').

Orthography

The conventional system of written symbols used to represent spoken language.

Phonics

A literacy-teaching approach that trains learners to use regularities and letter-sound relationships in the spelling system to decode written words.

Decoding

The process of connecting written forms or graphemes with speech sounds so that a written word can be recognized.

Slash brackets / /

The conventional notation used to enclose phonemic representations in linguistic transcription.

Square brackets [ ]

The conventional notation used in linguistic transcription when a more detailed phonetic representation is intended.

Intelligibility

The pedagogical goal of pronunciation teaching that prioritizes developing enough phonetic and phonological awareness to support clear, meaning-sensitive communication rather than imitating a single prestige accent.