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