Week 5 Phonology Vocab

Question 1

phonology

Answer 1

the study of the abstract categories that organize the sound system of a language.

Question 2

spectrogram

Answer 2

a graphic representation of the frequency distribution of the complex jumble of sound waves that give the hearing impression of speech sounds.

Question 3

phone

Answer 3

A physical realization of a speech sound like the voiceless or the voiced alveolar approximant

Question 4

phoneme

Answer 4

a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another in a particular language. Ex: p,b,d,t

Question 5

allophones of the phoneme

Answer 5

Phones which function as alternant realizations of the same phoneme

Question 6

narrow transcription

Answer 6

additional articulatory details in the transcription. Ex: [   ̥] in [ɹ ̥])

Question 7

distribution

Answer 7

the different positions in which a speech sound can occur or cannot occur in the words of a language.

Question 8

complementary distribution

Answer 8

Two sounds which are distributed in such a way that one can only occur where the other cannot occur

Question 9

minimal pairs

Answer 9

a pair of words which differ in only one sound, but differ in meaning

Question 10

neutralization

Answer 10

the elimination of certain distinctive features of

phonemes in certain environments.

Question 11

final devoicing

Answer 11

a voiced phoneme has a voiceless allophone in word-final position

Question 12

velarization

Answer 12

a secondary articulation of consonants by which the back of the tongue is raised toward the velum during the articulation of the consonant.

Question 13

aspirated stop

Answer 13

is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents.

Question 14

aspiration

Answer 14

the process of aspirating stops

Question 15

non-rhotic

Answer 15

r-sounds do not seem to occur in word-final position. In RP, the phoneme /ɹ/ is not absent word-finally; it is simply not pronounced.

Question 16

rhotic

Answer 16

r-sounds can occur in word-final position

Question 17

constituents

Answer 17

the elements that make up a syllable

Question 18

syllabic consonants

Answer 18

Consonants which occupy the central part of the syllable

Question 19

nucleus

Answer 19

‘slot for a vowel’, the nucleus can be filled by a vowel, a diphthong, or a syllabic consonant

Question 20

onset

Answer 20

‘slots for consonants’, the prevocalic slot

Question 21

coda

Answer 21

the postvocalic slot

Question 22

vowel epenthesis

Answer 22

The technical term for the insertion of vowels into syllables

Question 23

syllabification

Answer 23

Assigning syllable structure to words

Question 24

sonority

Answer 24

The technical term for the category that captures our acoustic impression of ‘clear audibility’

Question 25

sonority sequencing theory

Answer 25

claims that sounds preceding the nucleus (i.e. onsets) must rise in sonority, and sounds following the nucleus (i.e. codas) must fall in sonority