Phonology Flashcards
What is Phonology?
Phonology is the study of abstract categories that organize the sound system of a language.
What is a 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.
What is a phone?
A physical realization of a speech sound like the voiceless or the voiced alveolar approximant.
Allophones of the Phoneme
Phones which function as alternant realizations of the same phoneme.
Narrow Transcription
Additional articulatory details in the transcription.
Distribution
The different positions in which a speech sound can occur or cannot occur in the words of a language.
Complementary Distribution
Two sounds which are distributed in such a way that one can only occur where the other cannot occur.
Minimal Pairs
A pair of words which differ in only one sound, but differ in meaning.
Neutralisation
Refers to the fact that in a particular context, a
contrast between phonemes becomes invisible.
Final Devoicing
Voiced phoneme has a voiceless allophone in word-final position.
Aspiration
The process of aspirating stops.
Flapping
A consonant sound produced by a single quick flip of the tongue against the upper part of the mouth.
Constituents
A word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure.
Syllabic Consonants
Consonants which occupy the central part of the syllable.
Nucleus
The central part of the syllable.
Onset
The initial phonological unit of any word.
Coda
The final part of the syllable, placed after the central part of a syllable and usually containing multiple consonants.
Vowel Epenthesis
The insertion of vowels into syllables.
Syllabification
Assigning syllable structure to words.
Maximal Onset
Principle
A principle determining underlying syllable division.
Sonority
The perceptibility or distinctness of speech sounds when spoken in a context in which stress, pitch, and sound duration are constant.
Sonority Sequencing
Principle
Onsets must rise in sonority and codas must fall in sonority.
Phoneme
A sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question.
Phonetics
A branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign.
