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Week 1: Mythology and Folklore English Class Professor: John Michael Cultura
Week 1: Mythology and Folklore English Class Professor: John Michael Cultura
Phonology is the study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across languages. Put more formally,
phonology is the study of the categorical organisation of speech sounds in languages; how speech sounds
are organised in the mind and used to convey meaning. In this section of the website, we will describe the
most common phonological processes and introduce the concepts of underlying representations for sounds
versus what is actually produced, the surface form.
Phonology can be related to many linguistic disciplines, including psycholinguistics, cognitive science,
sociolinguistics and language acquisition. Principles of phonology can also be applied to treatments of
speech pathologies and innovations in technology. In terms of speech recognition, systems can be
designed to translate spoken data into text. In this way, computers process the language like our brains do.
The same processes that occur in the mind of a human when producing and receiving language occur in
machines. One example of machines decoding language is the popular intelligence system, Siri.
Phonology originated with the insight that much observable phonetic detail is irrelevant or predictable within
the system of a given language. This led to the positing of phonemes as minimal contrastive sound units in
language, each composed (according to many writers) of a collection of distinctive features of contrast.
Later work showed that a focus on surface contrast ultimately was misguided, and generative
phonology replaced this with a conception of phonology as an aspect of speakers' knowledge of linguistic
structure. Important research problems have involved the relation between phonological and phonetic form;
the mutual interaction of phonological regularities; the relation of phonological structure to other
components of grammar; and the appropriateness of rules vs. constraints as formulations of phonological
regularities.
Try saying the word 'helps' out loud, paying close attention to the final sound of the word. After that, say the
word 'crabs' out loud, again paying attention to the final sound. After getting over the embarrassment of
talking to yourself (especially if you're in a crowded place!), what did you notice about the final sounds of
these words?
If you said that they are different, you're absolutely correct! In 'helps', the final sound is pronounced like you
would expect the letter 's' to sound. However, in 'crabs', the ending should have sounded more like a 'z'.
The reasoning for this change can be found through the use of phonology, which is the study of speech
sounds and how they change depending on certain situations or placements in syllables, words, and
sentences.
Phonological Rules
One of the main components of phonology is the study and discovery of phonological rules. Rules are the
way phonologists predict how a speech sound will change depending on its position in various speech
environments. For example, the final 's' sounds in 'helps' and 'crabs' follow a simple-to-understand
phonological rule. In these words, the 's' sound changes depending on what speech sound immediately
precedes it.
Let's take a second and speak the following words out loud, paying close attention to the final 's' sound and
the sounds immediately preceding it. (Hint: Put two fingers on your throat as you pronounce the final sound
and the sound immediately before it. See if you can notice what happens.)
Helps
Crabs
Sits
Looks
Words
Gloves
Noticed how your throat vibrated as you said the final sound of each of these words, right? the English
plural written -s may be pronounced as [s] (in "cats"), [z] (in "cabs", "peas"), or as [əz] (in "buses"); these
forms are all theorized to be stored mentally as the same -s, but the surface pronunciations are derived
through a series of phonological rules.
Assimilation: When a sound changes one of its features to be more similar to an adjacent sound. This is the
kind of rule that occurs in the English plural rule described above—the -
s becomes voiced or voiceless depending on whether or not the preceding consonant is voiced.
Dissimilation: When a sound changes one of its features to become less similar to an adjacent sound,
usually to make the two sounds more distinguishable. This type of rule is often seen among people
speaking a language that is not their native language, where the sound contrasts may be difficult.
Insertion: When an extra sound is added between two others. This also occurs in the English plural rule:
when the plural morpheme z is added to "bus," "bus-z" would be unpronounceable for most English
speakers, so a short vowel (the schwa, [ə]) is inserted between [s] and the [z].
Deletion: When a sound, such as a stress-less syllable or a weak consonant, is not pronounced; for
example, most American English speakers do not pronounce the [d] in "handbag"
What is a phoneme?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another word in a language. This
chart shows all the phonemes used when speaking English.
Children will be taught the individual sounds of each letter of the alphabet in Reception. They will then start
to put these sounds together, to make short words, such as: cat, nap, pin, tap, etc. This is called blending
sounds.
They will learn that each of these words have three distinct sounds (phonemes). For example, cat has the
three sounds: /c/ /a/ and /t/.
In phonics we learn to read the "pure sound" of a phoneme, rather than letter names. For example, the
sound /s/ is pronounced 'ssssss' and not 'suh' or 'es'. Learning to read pure sounds makes it much easier
for children to blend sounds together as they progress with their reading.
“Digraphs”
They will also move onto words containing consonant clusters (two consonants placed together) such as
trap (tr is a consonant cluster) or bump (mp is a consonant cluster). Both of these words each contain four
phonemes as although consonant clusters involve letters being 'clustered' together, you can still hear the
two separate sounds.
They will then start to learn that a word could have a sound in it that is made up of two letters, for example:
boat
is made up of three phonemes: /b/ at the start, /oa/ in the middle and /t/ at the end.
The middle sound /oa/ is made up of two letters, so this is called a digraph. A digraph is a phoneme (single
sound) that is made up of two letters. The digraph above, /oa/, is a vowel digraph, because it is made up of
two vowels.
chip
The /ch/ in chip is a consonant digraph, where the two letters make up one single phoneme.
A single sound can also be made up of three letters, and this is called a trigraph. For example:
light
The /igh/ in this word is one sound that is made up of three letters, so this is a trigraph.
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in
the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign.
Phonetics – investigation of the physical production of speech sounds. We looked at the articulatory
mechanisms of the human vocal tract
In physical terms, there are an infinite number of ways a word like “me” will be produced
Phonetics broadly deals with two aspects of human speech: production—the ways humans make
sounds—and perception—the way speech is understood. The communicative modality of a
language describes the method by which a language produces and perceives languages.
Languages with oral-aural modalities such as English produce speech orally (using the mouth) and
perceive speech aurally (using the ears).
The orthography (spelling) of words in misleading, especially in English. One sound can be represented
by several different combinations of letters. For example, all of the following words contain the same
vowel sound: he, believe, Lee, Caesar, key, amoeba, loudly, machine, people, and sea. The
following poem illustrates this fact of English humorously (note the pronunciation of the bold words):