LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Socalled, Word Formation, Phoneme

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 100
• Professor: Clifford Burgess

Document Summary

Phonetic science also allows looking at spectrograms of human speech: these allow us to pull out vast amounts of information that are lost in the mix when listening (cid:449)ith o(cid:374)e"s ears. Spectrograms can be used in forensic analyses by agents of the law to help figure out who said what (although the courts still take a rather dim view of this approach. ) Related to phonetics, but concerned instead with the patterning of speech sounds: human languages each use only a selection of all possible speech sounds. Speech sounds within a language will contrast, i. e. , signal meaning differences. We can figure out contrasting sounds with minimal pairs: e. g. (cid:862)(cid:271)it(cid:863) a(cid:374)d (cid:862)(cid:271)eat(cid:863) ha(cid:448)e (cid:272)o(cid:374)trasti(cid:374)g (cid:448)o(cid:449)el sou(cid:374)ds a(cid:374)d the (cid:449)ords (cid:373)ea(cid:374) differe(cid:374)t thi(cid:374)gs. O [ ] and [i] contrast; each is a phoneme in english: but i (cid:272)a(cid:374) sa(cid:455) the (cid:449)ord (cid:862)(cid:271)e(cid:863) (cid:449)ith either a lo(cid:374)g vowel or a short vowel that"s a real di ere(cid:374)(cid:272)e.