Ch.3 Flashcards
Phonology
is the study of the abstract categories
that organize the sound system of a language.
spectrogram
a spectrogram is a graphic representation
of the frequency distribution of the complex jumble of sound waves that
give the hearing impression of speech sounds.
distribution
different positions in which a speech sound can occur or cannot
occur in the words of a language.
minimal pairs.
minimal pair is a pair of words which
differ in only one sound, but differ in meaning
Neutralisation
here refers to the fact that in a particular context, a
contrast between phonemes becomes invisible.
Neutralisation of the voicing contrast in German:
[d] in Räder
[t] in Rad
[t] in Rat
[t] in Räte
final devoicing.
final devoicing provides one of the most notorious
pitfalls when learning the pronunciation of the new language.
voiceless stops of English
/p/, /t/ and /k/.
aspiration
aspirated stops
syllabic consonants
occupy the central part of the syllable are termed
nucleus
Our ‘slot for a vowel’In English, the nucleus can be filled by a vowel, a diphthong,
or a syllabic consonant.
onset
the prevocalic slot
coda
postvocalic slot
syllabification
Assigning syllable structure to words
clear l
non-velarised realisation
Dark I
is what is called a velarised
realisation of /l/, also termed
the physical realisation of a speech sound like the voiceless or the
voiced alveolar approximant is a
phone
Phones which function as alternant realisations
of the same phoneme are called
allophones of the phoneme
Word pairs like wrap and lap or
wrap and map are called
minimal pairs
speakers can choose which allophone they use.
free variation
symbol ‘#’
to designate a word boundary,
and a line (‘ ’) to designate the position which interests us.
Here both /t/ and
/d/ can be realised as [ɾ], a process which is also known in the literature as
flapping
three major types of allophones:
an unreleased, an aspirated
(released) and a non-aspirated (released) allophone
elements of linguistic structure,
the elements that make up a syllable are termed
constituents
Consonants which occupy the central part of the syllable
syllabic consonants.
