Phonology Flashcards
Phoneme
underlying representations of speech sounds in the mental grammar
Morphemes
also underlying representations in the mental grammar (ex. different surface forms for English plural)
Children with speech sound disorder (SSD) are ___ able to acquire phonemic contrasts than typically developing (TD) children
less
Babies need to hear lots of meaningful contrasts between sounds; the clearest contrasts are in __________ ______
minimal pairs
Minimal pairs
words that differ in only one parameter, where that one parameter also changes the meaning of the word
Minimal pairs of words distinguished by stress
Noun-verb pairs with contrasting stress pattern (CONtrast vs. conTRAST)
Minimal pairs of words distinguished by tone
中文 😛 是 時 事 十 食 市
Smallest contrastive linguistic unit that can bring about change in meaning
phoneme
Contrastive distribution
Two (or more) sounds of a language are distributed across minimal pairs or environments in such a way that they create meaning contrasts between words
Different forms of the same underlying morpheme are _______
allomorphs (some are predictable based on phonological environment)
Phonemes can be realized in multiple ways as different __________
phones (use square brackets)
Possible alternate pronunciations of a phoneme are _________
allophones
Complementary distribution
Sounds of a language in complementary distribution are allophones
Sounds of a language are in complementary distribution if they __________________________
never occur in the same environment
Two lines are evidence for phonemes
Minimal pairs and shared environments
Natural classes of sounds
a group of all the sound segments (of a particular language) that share one or more articulatory properties [place, manner, voice, etc.])
Manner assimilation
Ex. when the stops /d/ and /t/ are between vowels, they change their manner of articulation to become more vowel-like
Voicing assimilation
Ex. when the voiceless stop /t/ is between vowels, it changes its voicing to become voiced like the vowels
‘Daughter’ dialects and languages arise from a ‘mother’ when:
A language change occurs in one region/group but not another, or the same language changes occur, but in different order
How to decide which allophone is the underlying representation (phoneme)?
The allophone with the LEAST restrictions is the phoneme
The final consonants in French words tout (‘all’), gros (‘fat’), and laid (‘ugly’) are no longer pronounced in the modern language. This is an example of:
deletion
Proto-Slavic *melko became modern Polish mleko. This is an example of:
metathesis
English speakers often pronounce cardamom as [kɑɹdəmən]. This is an example of:
dissimilation
The Old English word thunor became modern English thunder [θʌndəɹ]. This is an example of:
insertion
In German, Kinder ‘children’ is pronounced [kɪndɐ] with [d] but Kind ‘child’ is pronounced [kɪnt] with [t]. This is an example of:
voicing assimilation
If two sounds can distinguish the meaning of two different words, they are __________
phonemes
If two sounds of a language are in complementary distribution, they are ____________
allophones (of the same phoneme)
