Selfwritten Textbook BÜ English Linguistics:
2. Sounds and Phonology
Phonetics: Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. This includes:
- Articulatory phonetics:
othe study of how sounds are produced with the organs of the human vocal
tract
- Auditory phonetics:
oThe study of how sounds are heard and speech perception. This includes the
study of speech stimuli and the listeners responses to such stimuli.
- Acoustic phonetics:
oThe study of physical properties of speech waves that make up perceived
sounds
Overall, phonetics studies speech sounds produced and perceived by human beings, without
prior knowledge of what language is being spoken.
Phonology: Spoken sounds of a language
are grouped into a system of abstract
categories. Speaking and understanding
that language means learning that
system. Phonology is therefore the study
of the abstract categories that make up
said system. It deals with language-
specific sound patterns and patterns
grouped into larger phonological groups,
such as syllables and words.
Phoneme: Sounds are represented by
segments called phonemes. They’re
distinct units of sounds that distinguish
one word from another.
oE.g.: the p in “tap” separates it from words like “tab”, “tag”, and “tan”.
oWhen looking at the word “puff” and its transcription /pʌf/ it becomes clear
that puff has three phonemes: /p/, /ʌ/ and /f/.
A phoneme may have more than one variant, an allophone. Phonemes are based on spoken
language and recorded with the symbols of the IPA and are represented with slashes //.
Phone: A phoneme is the mental representation of a sound, i.e. the sound stored in our
brain. The actually produced sound is a phone.
oE.g.: When wanting to describe a small animal that meows, our brains search
for the lexical entry of the word “cat” and its phonemic representation that
are stored in our brains already. The vocal tract is then used to produce that
sounds, the so-called phones.
Phones are represented with brackets [].
