Phonetics

• Linguistics: scientific study of language
• Phonetics: science of human speech sounds
• Phoneme, Phone, Allophone: three categories of sound
• Phoneme: abstract minimal sound unit of a particular language; capable of distinguishing different words in that language.
• Minimal Pair Technique: words that are almost identical except for one phoneme in the same position
• Articulatory, Acoustic, Auditory: branches of phonetics
• Articulatory: oldest branch of phonetics; examines the articulatory organs and their role in the production of speech sounds
• Acoustic: deals with the physical properties of speech sounds as they travel through the air in the form of sound waves
• Auditory: examines the way in which human beings perceive speech sounds through the medium of the ear
• Notation: the system of transcription sounds to make an accurate and unambiguous record of what goes on in speech
• Description: it is the description of speech sounds
• Vowel: produced by shaping the oral cavity to give the sound particular color or timbre
• Monophthong: a single vowel sound
• Diphthong: a complex two-vowel sound
• Triphthong: a three-vowel sound that glides together
• Consonant: produced with partial restrictions of the vocal tract
• Phonology: study of the sound system of language; the rules that govern pronunciation
• Syllable: a phonological unit consisting of one sound
• Onset: consonants or consonant blends before the rime
• Rime: consists of a nucleus and the consonant following it
• Nucleus: usually a vowel
• Coda: any consonant following the rime
• Blend: two or more consonants; when combine two sounds two sounds are heard
• Digraph: two or more consonant sounds; when combined one sound is heard
• Sibilant: an example of a fricative sound; a hissing sound
• Allophones: systematic variations of a phoneme; specific properties of a phoneme vary according to its position in a word (aspirated, unaspirated)
• Phonemes are classified as consonants (stop, fricative, nasal, liquid, glide) or vowels (monophthong, diphthong, triphthong)
• The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) provides symbols for all known speech sounds.