LING 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: International Phonetic Alphabet, Cognitive Test, Phoneme

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Sprouse Jon

Document Summary

Two big questions for today: speech sound in english, physical properties of the speech sounds in english, speech sound in english. Phoneme: a technical term for speech sound: the smallest segment of speech that leads to a meaningful difference between words, take a word, change one of the speech sounds in it. If the change leads to a change in the meaning of the word, then the original sound and the new sound are distinct phonemes. The cognitive test for phonemes: step 1: pick a word in the language. Sat: step 2: change one sound in the word. Sad: other example of two distinct phonemes: lake and rake, example of two sounds that aren"t distinct phonemes: sat and sath. If the changed sound leads to a different word, then the two sounds (the original and the new one) are both distinct phonemes in the language!