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Speech Sounds (Prosody - Phonetics - Phonology)

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Speech Sounds
  • prosody is concerned with the suprasegmentals (properties) of syllables and larger units of speech (e.g. stress, length, intonation, syllabification, tone, etc)
  • phonetics and phonology are heavily overlapping subfields cover all the sounds that humans can make, as well as which sounds make up different languages
  • phonetics is the study of phones, which are speech sounds detached from language
    • the study of the description and classification of speech sounds (phonemes)
    • how sounds are produced, transmitted and received
    • independent to language
  • phonology is the study of phonemes, which are the speech sounds attached to an individual language
    • the study of the speech sounds used in a particular language. including the differences and similarities of speech sounds (phonemes) sets of languages
    • dependent to language

  • phone - any unit of speech sound (detached from language, see: International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA))
    • diphone - a sequence of 2 phones
    • triphone - a sequence of 3 phones
  • syllable - a unit of pronunciation
  • suprasegmentals - properties of syllables and/or larger units of speech (e.g. stress, length, intonation, syllabification, tone, etc)
  • allophone - any of the phones that represent a single phoneme
    • e.g. the aspirated k in kit and the unaspirated k in skit, which are allophones of the phoneme k
  • phoneme - a unit of speech sound in specified language that distinguish word from another (each language has its own distinct set of phonemes)
    • examples:
      • the word “dog” has three phonemes: /d/, /o/, and /g/.
      • the word “shape,” despite having five letters, has only three phonemes: /sh/, /long-a/, and /p/
    • the English language has approximately 45 different phonemes, which correspond to letters or combinations of letters