PSYC10003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 31: Phonotactics, Paper Cup, Phoneme
12 Jun 2018
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Lecture 31, Wednesday, 18 May 2016
PSYC10003 - MIND, BRAIN & BEHAVIOUR 1
LECTURE 31
INTRO TO LANGUAGE
LANGUAGE
•When you know a language, you have the capacity to produce sounds that correspond to certain
meanings, and the ability to understand and interpret the sounds produced by others.
•Languages consist of a set of arbitrary symbols (words) combined by syntactic rules to enable
relationships between concepts to be expressed and thoughts to be conveyed amongst people.
THE SOUND OF LANGUAGE
PHONOLOGY
•Knowing a language means knowing which sounds are in that language and which are not.
•More than this, it means knowing which sounds can start a word, end a word and follow each
other. When we know a language, we know what’s ‘allowed’ or ‘legal’ in that language. These are
phonotactic rules; rules for combining sounds.
•We have about 44 speech sounds and these construct all of the words in the english language.
•Phonotactic rules;
•Knowledge of which sounds can start a word, which sounds can be combined, and which sounds
can end a word, but you probably cant verbalise this knowledge.
•For example, the combination ‘zb’ is not permissible in English, but is a legal combination in
Polish.
•Phonotactic rules define the implicit knowledge that speakers have of the sound patterns that are
permissible, ‘legal’, in their language. For example, in English, the sound “ng” at the end of the
word “rang” cannot be used to start a word, whereas languages such as Vietnamese do allow this
sound to start a word.
•A phoneme is a word sounds. It is the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to
distinguish one utterance in a given language from another.
•Consonants and vowels cannot make up the entire language and there are almost zero words that
are made of only consonants.
•Phonemes form a finite set of building blocks that combine to produce an infinite set of words.
•Every language has a set of phonemes which are the building blocks of the language.
•The English language consists of 44 phonemes. Eg. pat tap pot top pit.
•Every spoken language is defined by a set of phonemes. All of the words in the English language
are constructed from a set of 44 phonemes. Other languages consist of different numbers of
phonemes, some as few as 15, and others as many as 80. The words “pat” and “tap” consist of the
same set of three phonemes, just in reverse order. “Pat” differs from “pot” by a single phoneme,
etc.
•In this way, phonetic distinctions allow us to create an infinite set of words from a finite set of
building blocks. The average English speaker is capable of processing speech at the rate of 30
phonemes per second.
•When we say ‘Put the paper cup to your lip’, you will feel a puff of air on your hand for the /p/
in put and paper but not for cup and lip. The /p/ in put and cup are physically different sounds
but we don’t distinguish between them in English because the difference is not meaningful.
However, the difference is meaningful in Thai (for example).
•Phonemes are abstract categories used to represent a range of speech sounds that vary depending
on the speaker and phonemic context of the word. Thus, the same phoneme can sound different in
different contexts.
•The role of the language learner is to identify the set of phonemes that specifies their language and
to “screen out” distinctions that are not informative. In English, the physical differences between
the “p” sounds that are present in “paper” and “lip” are ignored because this distinction is not one !
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