Muhammad Hisyam Alfalaq Linguistics 5B

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1. What is similarities and differences between phonetics and phonology?

 Similarities:
they both are the study of speech sound in language.

Differences:
Phonetics: The study of how speech sounds are produced by vocal track.
Phonology: The study of the systematic patterning and organization of speech sound in a
language.

2. What is a phoneme? give examples

 Phoneme is a mental abstract representation of a speech sound, it can change meaning when
you switch one with another sound (two different words with two different meaning)

Example: ship and sheep

3. Describe the concept of allophone by giving explanation from its examples?

 Allophones is phonetic realization of a phoneme. The difference with phoneme is that allophone
doesn’t result in the change of meaning if you say it wrong, but it will just sound weird for native
speaker. For example the T in the words "stop" and "Top", are very different. The "T" in "stop" is not
pronounced aspirated, while the T in "top" is aspirated sound.

4. Describe the concept of minimal pairs and complementary distribution? give clear examples?

 Minimal Pairs : A pair of words that vary with just one sound. Example: /f/ and /v/ in word fan
and van

Complementary Distribution: Distribution of phones in their respective phonetics, where one

phone never appears in the same context as another. Example: [P] and [Ph] are allophones of the
phoneme /p/ because they appear in a complementary distribution.