Phonemes and Phones – Quick Review

Phones: actual sounds across all languages; no inherent meaning attached.
Phonemes: mental categories that assign meaning; language-specific rules determine which sounds belong to which phoneme.
In any language, you hear a variety of phones before forming phoneme categories.

Three ways to say the p sound:
- Aspirated: with a small puff of air (e.g., in pin). Notation: [pʰ] or similar; often represented with a small "h" after the p.
- Unaspirated: little to no air (e.g., in spin).
- Unreleased: no audible release at the end of the word (e.g., in stop). Notation: [p̚].
All three are phones (different realizations of the same p sound).
End of word p is often unreleased, though speaker variation exists; context and listener can influence perception.
In brackets, symbols indicate articulation (aspirated, unaspirated, unreleased).

Aspirated: denoted with a small h after the consonant in transcription (e.g., [pʰ])
Unreleased: indicated with a line or diacritic at the end (e.g., [p̚])
Unaspirated: plain p (no diacritic) ([p])
These diacritics apply to many stop sounds beyond p (e.g., t, d).

Bengali: dentalized t (touching teeth) creates a separate phoneme from alveolar t; two sounds sit in two mental categories.
English: both tongue placements (t sounds) fall into one phoneme category; no separate phoneme distinction.
Phonemes are language-specific in how we categorize sounds as meaning-bearing units; phones are the raw sounds heard.

Babies hear many phones and rapidly form mental categories; early years are a window for acquiring language-specific phoneme distinctions.
As children learn a language, some native contrasts become non-salient if not phonemic in that language.
For language learning, re-wiring perceptual categories (e.g., Bengali vs English) is needed to treat certain phones as distinct phonemes.

Phones are sounds; phonemes are the mental categories that carry meaning.
p-sound variants: aspirated [pʰ], unaspirated [p], unreleased [p̚].
Notation uses diacritics and brackets; end-of-word unreleased is common but variable.
Phoneme distinctions are language-specific (e.g., Bengali vs English t).
Developmentally, exposure shapes which phones become distinct phonemes in a language.

Intonation/pitch patterns create contrastive meaning and affect interpretation.
Stress placement (e.g., contest vs contest) demonstrates how pitch and stress influence meaning.