PHONETICS AND

PHONOLOGY

The study of sound in language

Phonetics vs Phonology
PHONETICS (the study of speech
sounds)
 Deals with ‘actual’ physical sounds as
they are manifested in human speech.
 Concentrates on acoustic waveforms,
formant values, measurements of
duration measured in miliseconds and
of amplitude and frequency.
 Concentrates on physical principles
underlying the production of sounds.
 Considers the study of resonances and
muscles and other articulatory
structures used to produce physical
sounds.
PHONOLOGY (the study of how
speech sounds form patterns)
 Deals with an abstract cognitive system
of the rules in a mental grammar of
language sounds.
 Concerns with symbolic sounds
(cognitive abstractions of language
sounds).
 Concerns with the sounds of language.
 Concerns with rules for combining
sounds.
 Concerns with variations in
pronunciation.
Def
A sound is a complex pattern of rapid variation in air
pressure, traveling from a sound source and striking the
ear, which causes a series of neutral signals to be received
in the brain.

VISUAL REPRESENTATION:
WAVEFORMS
SOUND SPECTRA
SPECTOGRAM
The science of phonetics attempts to describe
all of the sounds used in all languages of the
world.
Acoustic phonetics focuses on the physical
properties of sounds;
auditory phonetics is concerned with how
listeners perceive these sounds; and
articulatory phonetics the study of how the
vocal tract produces the sounds of language
Organs of Speech
 •Vowels
Speech sounds
(Based on the way they
are produced) •Consonants
 Vowels
☼Sounds produced without any obstruction in the vocal
cords
☼Parameters in describing vowels:
1. the height of the tongue body (high-mid-low)
2. the position of the tongue along front/back dimension
(front-central-back)
3. the presence/absence of lip rounding (rounded–
unrounded)

e.g.
[i] is front high unrounded vowel
 Consonants
☼Sounds produced with obstruction in the vocal cords
☼Parameters in describing consonants:
1. the voicing state (voiced C-voiceless C)
2. the place of articulation (bilabial, labiodental, velar,
etc.)
3. the manner of articulation (plossive, fricative, etc.)

e.g.
[p] is voiceless bilabial plossive
[b] is voiced bilabial plossive
 Phonemes & Phones
☼Phonemes  the basic form of a sound & are sensed in
our mind rather than spoken/heard
☼Phones  the physical realization of phonemes
☼Differences :

Phonemes Phones

Symbol / / [ ]
Function to distinguish meaning not to distinguish meaning
Form Abstract concrete
 Allophones
☼Variation ( a collection of phones) of the same phoneme
☼Are in complementary distribution (never occuring in
identical environment)
☼e.g.
[p] [ph]
spill [spil] pill [ph il]
sip [sip] pet [ph ɛt]
[ph] / # -
/p/
[p] / elsewhere
 Allophones
☼The example shows that [p] and [ph] are predictable - [ph]
always occurs in the initial position – and both do not
distinguish meaning, i.e. they are interchangeable. That
mean you can say [pil] for ‘pill’ or [sph il] for ‘spill’

☼Thus, they are allophone of phoneme /p/

 Allophones
☼Minimal Pair (MP) a pair of words which are the same in
everyway except for one sound segment which occurs in
the same place
e.g.
[fan] - [van]
[big] - [pig]

☼MP is used to prove whether two phones which are

paired derive from the same phoneme (thus, allophone)
or from different phoneme
 Prosodic phonology
☼ Word stress (stress can be contrastive in English)

☼ Sentence and phrase stress (primary stress usually

shows the most important part of a construction)

☼ Intonation (may reflect semantic or syntactic

differences)