PSY270H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Vocal Folds, Parsing, Phoneme
9
PSY270H1 Full Course Notes
Verified Note
9 documents
Document Summary
Language is a way of communicating using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings/thoughts/ideas/experiences. Phonemes are the shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word. In some ways they are like letters, but there"s not a 1-1 mapping between phonemes and letters. Rough has 3 phonemes [r] [u] [f: you can have multiple letters that map onto the same phoneme. S and c for [s: this is why english has 26 letters but 47 phonemes. Across all languages there are around 200 phonemes- english just doesn"t distinguish between most of them. Phonemes are generated when we: force air from our lungs through our vocal tract, mouth and nose. The specific sound depends on: whether the vocal cords are vibrating ([sa] vs [za], how the airflow is disrupted ([sa] vs [ta], the place that the airflow is disrupted, often the tongue position ([pa] vs [tha] vs.
