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Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their Phonemes or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs.The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety.
Phonological development refers to how children learn to organize sounds into meaning or language during their stages of growth. Sound is at the beginning of language learning. Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and to segment the speech stream they are exposed to into units – eventually meaningful units – in order to ...
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
The Sound Pattern of English (frequently referred to as SPE) is a 1968 work on phonology (a branch of linguistics) by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. In spite of its title, it presents not only a view of the phonology of English, but also contains discussions of a large variety of phonological phenomena of many other languages. The index lists ...
Optimality theory (frequently abbreviated OT) is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the optimal satisfaction of conflicting constraints. OT differs from other approaches to phonological analysis, which typically use rules rather than constraints.
For example, the English vowel sound [æ], traditionally called the short A, in a word like mat (phonetically [mæt]), has the consonant [m] preceding it and the consonant [t] following it, while the [æ] itself is word-internal and forms the syllable nucleus. This all describes the phonetic environment of [æ].
For example, the English words kid and kit end with two distinct phonemes, /d/ and /t/, and swapping one for the other would change one word into a different word. However, the difference between the /p/ sounds in pun ( [pʰ] , with aspiration ) and spun ( [p] , without aspiration) never affects the meaning or identity of a word in English.
In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that distinguishes one sound from another within a language.For example, the feature [+voice] distinguishes the two bilabial plosives: [p] and [b] (i.e., it makes the two plosives distinct from one another).