ENGLISH 3271 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Phoneme, Sensory System

• School: Ohio State University
• Department: English
• Course: ENGLISH 3271
• Professor: Lauren Squires

Document Summary

Phonetics describes how speech sounds are physically produced. Phonology describes how these sounds are mentally organized into a system. Phonemes are mental, abstract representations of distinct sounds in a language: not actual, physical speech sounds. When we hear an actual, physical speech sound, we categorize it as an instance of a phoneme: we comprehend speech by sorting the sound waves we hear into meaningful distinct categories. A phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in another language. A single phoneme is phonetically realized in more than one way.