LIN102H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Nasal Consonant, Minimal Pair, Complementary Distribution
Document Summary
Human beings can produce and perceive a large number of speech sounds. Every language makes its own selection from the range of possible speech sounds and organizes them into a system of contrasts and patterns; this system makes up a language"s phonology. It"s concerned with the relationships among individual speech sounds. At a higher level, it"s necessary to think about how sounds are organized into syllables, units of phonological organization that are crucial to the patterning of sounds. At a lower level, we consider features, the articulatory and acoustic building blocks of sounds that are also crucial to understanding why sounds systems have the particular contrasts and patterns that they do. A key insight of phonological analysis is that the choice of the final consonant in words may create a contrast between two different words, such as win (w n) .
