1.How we organize the sounds of speech?

1.1 Phonology

1.2 Phonemes

1.3 Allophones

1.4 Minimal pairs and sets

1.5 Syllables

2 How children learn speech sounds: the first year

2.1 Speech reception and Speech production

Reference
WHAT IS PHONOLOGY?

Phonology is the subfield of linguistics that studies the structure

and systematic patterning of sounds in human language. The term
phonology is used in two ways. On the one hand, it refers to a
description of the sounds of a particular language and the rules
governing the distribution of those sounds. Thus, we can talk about
the phonology of English, German, or any other language. On the
other hand, it refers to that part of the general theory of human
language that is concerned with the universal properties of natural
language sound systems (i.e., properties reflected in many, if not
all, human languages).(Akmajian ,2001: 109)
Phonology tells you what sounds are in your language and which
ones are foreign; it tells you what combinations of sounds could be
an actual word, whether it is (black) or isn’t (blick), and what
combination of sounds could not be an actual word (*lbick). It also
explains why certain phonetic features are important to identifying
a word, for example voicing in English as in pat versus bat, while
other features, such as aspiration in English, are not crucial to
identifying a word. And it also allows us to adjust our pronunciation
of a morpheme, for example the past or plural morpheme, to suit
the different phonological contexts that it occurs in.( Fromkin .
2011, 227)

Phonemes
Each one of these meaning-distinguishing sounds in a language
is described as a phoneme. When we learn to use alphabetic
writing, we are actually using the concept of the phoneme as the
single stable sound type which is represented by a single written
symbol. It is in this sense that the phoneme /t/ is described as a
sound type, of which all the different spoken versions of [t] are
tokens. Note that slash marks are conventionally used to indicate a
phoneme, /t/, an abstract segment, as opposed to the square
brackets, as in [t], used for each phonetic or physically produced
segment. ( YULE ,2010 :42)
An essential property of a phoneme is that it functions
contrastively. We know there are two phonemes /f/ and /v/ in
English because they are the only basis of the contrast in meaning
between the words fat and vat, or fine and vine. This contrastive
property is the basic operational test for determining the phonemes
that exist in a language. If we substitute one sound for another in a
word and there is a change of meaning, then the two sounds
represent different phonemes.(Ibid)

Allophone
Central to the concept of the phoneme is the idea that it may be
pronounced in many different ways. In English (BBC
pronunciation) we take it for granted that the r sounds in ‘ray’ and
‘tray’ are “the same sound” (i.e. the same phoneme), but in reality
the two sounds are very different – the r in ‘ray’ is voiced and non-
fricative, while the r sound in ‘tray’ is voiceless and fricative. In
phonemic transcription we use the same symbol r for both, but we
know that the allophones of r include the voiced non-fricative
sound ɹ and the voiceless fricative one . (Roach,2009)

In theory a phoneme can have an infinite number of allophones,

but in practice for descriptive purposes we tend to concentrate on
a small number that occur most regularly. (Ibid )
Minimal pairs and sets
Phonemic distinctions in a language can be tested via pairs
and sets of words. When two words such as pat and bat are
identical in form except for a contrast in one phoneme, occurring in
the same position, the two words are described as a minimal pair.
More accurately, they would be classified as a minimal pair in the
phonology of English. (Arabic, for example, does not have this
contrast between /p/ and /b/.) Other examples of English minimal
pairs are fan–van, bet–bat, site–side. Such pairs have traditionally
been used in the teaching andtestingof Englishas a secondor
foreign language to help students develop the ability to understand
the contrast in meaning based on the minimal sound contrast.
When a group of words can be differentiated, each one from the
others, by changing one phoneme (always in the same position in
the word), then we have a minimal set. For example, one
minimal set based on the vowel phonemes of English could
include feat, fit, fat, fate, fought, foot, and another minimal set
based on consonant phonemes could have big, pig, rig, fig, dig,
wig.(Ibid)
Syllables
A syllable must contain a vowel or vowel-like sound, including
diphthongs. The most common type of syllable in language also
has a consonant (C) before the vowel (V) and is typically
represented as CV. Technically, the basic elements of the syllable
are the onset (one or more consonants) followed by the rhyme.
The rhyme (sometimes written as “rime”) consists of a vowel,
which is treated as the nucleus, plus any following consonant(s),
described as the coda.(Ibid)
Syllables like me, to or no have an onset and a nucleus, but no
coda. They are known as open syllables. When a coda is present,
as in the syllables up, cup, at or hat, they are called closed
syllables. The basic structure of the kind of syllable found in
English words like green (CCVC), eggs (VCC), and (VCC), ham
(CVC), I (V), do (CV), not (CVC), like (CVC), them (CVC), Sam
(CVC), I (V), am (VC) is shown in the accompanying diagram.(Ibid)
How children learn speech sounds: the first year

We have minds and in our minds we have the means for

producing and comprehending speech. But how did we come to
have such abilities? At birth we cannot comprehend speech, nor
can we produce speech. Yet, by the age of 4 years we have
learned vocabulary and grammatical rules for creating a variety of
sentence structures including negatives, questions, and relative
clauses. And although 4-year-olds still have passives and some
other elaborate syntactic structures to learn, along with a never-
ending stock of vocabulary items, they have already overcome the
most difficult obstacles in language learning. This is true of
children the world over, whatever the language may be.(Steinberg
2006:3)

The Perception and Production of Speech Sounds

The notion that a person is born with a mind like a blank slate is
belied by a wealth of evidence that newborns are reactive to some
subtle distinctions in their environment and not to others. That is,
the mind appears to be attuned at birth to receive certain kinds of
information. Infants will respond to visual depth and distance
distinctions, to differences between rigid and flexible physical
properties of objects, and to human faces rather than to other
visual stimuli. (Fromkin 2011:333)
Infants also show a very early response to different properties of
language. Experiments demonstrate that infants will increase their
sucking rate—measured by ingeniously designed pacifiers—when
stimuli (visual or auditory) presented to them are varied, but will
decrease the sucking rate when the same stimuli are presented
repeatedly. Early in acquisition when tested with a preferential
listening technique, they will also turn their heads toward and listen
longer to sounds, stress patterns, and words that are familiar to
them. These instinctive responses can be used to measure a
baby’s ability to discriminate and recognize different linguistic
stimuli.A newborn will respond to phonetic contrasts found in
human languages even when these differences are not phonemic
in the language spoken in the baby’s home. A baby hearing a
human voice over a loudspeaker saying [pa] [pa] [pa] will slowly
decrease her rate of sucking. If the sound changes to [ba] or even
[pʰa], the sucking rate increases dramatically. Controlled
experiments show that adults find it difficult to differentiate
between the allophones of one phoneme, but for infants it comes
naturally. Japanese infants can distinguish between [r] and [l]
whereas their parents cannot; babies can hear the difference
between course cannot. Babies can discriminate between sounds
that are phonemic in other languages and nonexistent in the
language of their parents. For example, in Hindi, there is a
phonemic contrast between a retroflex “t” [ʈ] (made with the tongue
curled back) and the alveolar [t]. To English-speaking adults, these
may sound the same; to their infants, they do not.(Ibid :334)
Infants can perceive voicing contrasts such as [pa] versus [ba],
contrasts in place of articulation such as [da] versus [ga], and
contrasts in manner of articulation such as [ra] versus [la], or [ra]
versus [wa], among many others. Babies will not react, however, to
distinctions that never correspond to phonemic contrasts in any
human language, such as sounds spoken more or less loudly or
sounds that lie between two phonemes. Furthermore, a vowel that
we perceive as [i], for example, is a different physical sound when
produced by a male, female, or child, but babies ignore the
nonlinguistic aspects of the speech signal just as adults do.
Infants appear to be born with the ability to perceive just those
sounds that are phonemic in some language. It is therefore
possible for children to learn any human language they are
exposed to. During the first year of life, the infant’s job is to
uncover the sounds of the ambient language. From around six
months, he begins to lose the ability to discriminate between
sounds that are not phonemic in his own language. His linguistic
environment molds the infant’s initial perceptions. Japanese
infants can no longer hear the difference between [r] and [l], which
do not contrast in Japanese, whereas babies in English-speaking
homes retain this perception. They have begun to learn the sounds
of the language of their parents. Before that, they appear to know
the sounds of human language in general.(Ibid)

REFRENCES

Introduction
Danny D. Steinberg and Natalia V. Sciarini (2006)
An Introduction to Psycholinguistics ,Pearson
Longman. England
to Language
Peter Roach (2009) English phonetics and phonology,
Cambridge University Press: UK
Victoria Fromkin Robert Rodman Nina Hyams (2011), An
Introduction to Language,ninth edition, Senior Publisher:USA

Yule.G (2010) The study of the language fourth edition:

Cambridge University press,UK