PHONEMICS (PHONOLOGY) AND PHONETICS Some basic definitions:

• Phoneme:
  • an ideal sound unit with a complete set of articulatory gestures.
    
    
  • the basic theoretical unit for describing how speech conveys linguistic meaning.
    
    
  • In English, there are about 42 phonemes.
    
    
  • Types of phonemes: vowels, semivowels, dipthongs, and consonants.
  
  
• Phonemics: the study of abstract units and their relationships in a language
  
  
• Phone: the actual sounds that are produced in speaking (for example, "d" in letter pronounced "l e d er").
  
  
• Phonetics: the study of the actual sounds of the language
  
  
• Allophones: the collection of all minor variants of a given sound ("t" in eight versus "t" in "top")
  
  
• Monophones, Biphones, Triphones: sequences of one, two, and three phones. Most often used to describe acoustic models.

Three branches of phonetics:

• Articulatory phonetics: manner in which the speech sounds are produced by the articulators of the vocal system.
  
  
• Acoustic phonetics: sounds of speech through the analysis of the speech waveform and spectrum
  
  
• Auditory phonetics: studies the perceptual response to speech sounds as reflected in listener trials.

Issues:

• Broad phonemic transcriptions vs. narrow phonetic transcriptions