Phonemes the smallest sound unit in a particular language that can indicate a difference in meaning Lets take an example from English and another from Arabic In English t is considered a phoneme because the change of this sound in the word ID: 206682
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Slide1
PhonologySlide2
Phonemes
: the smallest sound unit in a particular language that can indicate a difference in meaning. Let’s take an example from English and another from Arabic. In English
/t/
is considered a phoneme because the change of this sound in the word
bit
/bit
/ into another such as
bid
/
bid
/ changes the meaning of the word. But whether the phoneme
/t
/
is pronounced as
[t]
in a word
like
pit
/pit/
or
[T]
as in the word but /
b t
/ does not make any difference.Slide3
On the other hand, Arabic has the phoneme
/
t/as in the word /
taab
/ and another phoneme
[T
]
as in the word
/
Taab
/ ,
because substituting one for the other changes the meaning of the word
.
Slide4
Allophones
: The various pronunciations of a phoneme are called allophones.
For example,
the
[t] sound in the word
tar
is normally pronounced with a
stronger puff
of air than is present in the [t] sound in the word
star
. If you put the back of
your hand
in front of your mouth as you say
tar
, then
star,
you should be able to feel
some physical
evidence of aspiration (the puff of air) accompanying the [t] sound at
the beginning
of tar (but not in star). This aspirated version is represented more
precisely
as
[
tʰ
].
Slide5
The letter /l/ is pronounced differently in different word positions. In the word
lamb
it is alveolar (called clear l
But in the word
lull
both sounds are
velarized
(called dark l. We have to pronounce the phoneme differently in the two positions because of the vowel sound that comes before or after it. However, this does not make the two sounds two different phonemes. They are still one phoneme in English.Slide6
The crucial distinction between phonemes and allophones is that substituting one
phoneme for another will result in a word with a different meaning (as well as a
different pronunciation), but substituting allophones only results in a different (and
perhaps unusual) pronunciation of the same word.Slide7Slide8Slide9
In the preceding chapter, we investigated the physical production of speech sounds in
terms of the
articulatory
mechanisms of the human vocal tract…
Every
individual has a physically different vocal
tract. In
purely physical terms, every individual will pronounce
sounds differently.Slide10
Phonology
(phonemics)is concerned with the sound patterns of particular languages (e.g. English or Arabic) and with the rules according to which each language arranges its sounds to form meaningful units.Slide11
When a child acquires his mother tongue he also acquires the phonological knowledge about that language. This knowledge” permits a speaker to produce sounds which form meaningful utterances , to recognize a foreign accent, to make up new words, to add the appropriate phonetic segments, to form plurals and past tenses,…, to know what is or is not a sound in one’s language, and to know that different phonetic strings may represent the same meaningful unit
.”( Fromkin,1993:216
)