Phonetics and Phonology

The study of PRONUNCIATION consists of two fields: PHONETICS PHONOLOGY

What is Phonetics? Phonetics is the study of human speech sounds. Articulatory phonetics Acoustic phonetics Auditory phonetics How speech sounds are produced by the human vocal apparatus. The perception of speech sounds. Transmission and physical properties of speech sounds.

What is Phonology? Phonology is how speech sounds are organized and affect one another in pronunciation. It deals with the system and pattern of sounds which exist within a particular language. The study of phonology of English looks at the vowels, consonants and suprasegmental features of the language ( stress, intonation)

When we talk about vowels and consonants, within the discipline of phonology, we are referring to the different sounds we make when speaking, and NOT the vowel and consonant letters we refer to when talking about spelling.

Phonemes PIN PEN PET BET In any language we can identify a small number of regularly used sounds (vowels and consonants) that we call PHONEMES. A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language. For Example: PIN PEN PET BET

MAN m æ n When we speak we produce a CONTINUOUS STREAM OF SOUNDS. In studying speech we divide this stream into small pieces that we call SEGMENTS. For Example: MAN m æ n

MINE m aɪ n It is not always easy to decide on the number of segments. For Example: MINE m aɪ n

Consider written English LETTERS AND SOUNDS It is very important to learn to think of English pronunciation in terms of Phonemes rather than letters of the alphabet. Consider written English enough through thorough thought bough think those thistle thong church chemistry loch Cheryl

Special symbols are used to represent speech sounds.