LING 1010 Language and Mind Prof Jon Sprouse 09 02 15 Phonemes i e speech sounds Let s start with sound and work our way up words meanings un believ able x dog x sparky sound meaning sentences S speech sounds John VP bought a NP car Two big questions for today As our first foray into the speech sound portion of language today we will focus on the first two logical questions that we can ask about how speech and sound works in language words meanings un believ able sound speech sounds 1 x dog x sparky What are the speech sounds in a meaning given language e g English 2 What are the physical properties of the speech sounds in a given sentences S language e g English John VP bought a NP car What are the speech sounds in English Phoneme A technical term for speech sound The first thing we are going to do is science up our terminology In this class we are going to need to be precise about the objects we are talking about so we need technical terms that have precise meanings Though we all know intuitively what a speech sound is in linguistics we use the technical term phoneme instead of the intuitive term speech sound Because the primary function of speech sounds in a language is to construct distinct words we can use the fact that distinct words will have at least one distinct speech sound as a technical definition for phoneme phoneme The smallest segment of speech that leads to a meaningful difference between words The nice thing about this definition is that it comes with a built in test 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 Step 2 Change one sound in the word sat sad Different words 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 Here is another example of two distinct phonemes lake rake Different words So l and r are distinct phonemes in English And here is an example of two sounds that aren t distinct phonemes sat sat h Same word th is a fancy way of saying pronounce a t and blow out at the same time So t and th are not distinct phonemes in English Let s give each phoneme a symbol The International Phonetic Alphabet IPA was created so that we can easily write phonemes Each phoneme that occurs in a language in the world is given a symbol And each symbol is used only once so there is no confusion These are the IPA symbols for English phonemes But there are many more symbols for phonemes that occur in other languages The IPA has a symbol for every phoneme in every language over 300 You do not have to memorize the IPA for this class But you should know what it is and why it exists Why don t we just use the alphabet ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ The alphabet isn t a very good system for naming phonemes Can you see why A as in or C as in or The problem with the alphabet is that there is no one to one relationship between symbols letters and phonemes The classic joke The many to many relationship between letters and phonemes has led to really dorky jokes like this The next step Now that we have a process for identifying all of the phonemes in a language and we have a set of symbols for writing each one down we can ask the next big question What are the physical properties of each phoneme that makes them distinct from each other What are the physical properties of the phonemes of English and other languages Sound is a distortion in air pressure Sound is a wave that travels through air This means that a sound wave is a disturbance in air pressure or how closely packed the air molecules are Sound travels in waves Everybody knows that sound is a wave but what exactly does that mean The first thing to realize is that there are two types of waves Waves in the ocean are transverse waves This means the oscillation is perpendicular to the direction the disturbance is moving Sound waves are longitudinal waves This means the oscillation moves in the same direction as the disturbance The pdf version of this slide won t show the animation so you can use this link to see the motion of transverse and longitudinal waves http gifsoup com view 3529701 longitudinal waves html Properties of waves Waves have several properties Here are two that have an impact on the way we experience sound so you might think that they are relevant to phonemes 1 Amplitude is a measure of the force applied to an area of air during compression The perceptual effect of amplitude is a change in loudness High amplitude sounds are perceived to be louder low amplitude sounds are less loud 2 Frequency is a measure of the number of compression cycles that a wave completes in a given unit of time The perceptual effect of frequency is a change in pitch or tone High frequency sounds have high pitches low frequency sounds have low pitches Can you think of a way to test whether amplitude and or frequency are important to phonemes Is amplitude important to phonemes Here is a simple experiment to determine if amplitude is critical to the difference between phonemes Step 1 say ah Step 2 say ah with high amplitude Step 3 say ah with low amplitude Remember amplitude is a measure of the size of the distortion it is the force applied to the air to cause the disturbance Question Did varying the amplitude result in a different phoneme e g ee Alternative experiment say ah and ee with the same amplitude Conclusion Varying the amplitude does not result in changes in the phonemes only changes in loudness so amplitude is not critical to the difference between phonemes Is frequency important to phonemes Here is a simple experiment to determine if frequency is critical to the difference between phonemes Step 1 say ah Step 2 say ah with high frequency Step 3 say ah with low frequency Remember frequency is a measure of the number of cycles the wave completes in a given time You might know it as the pitch of the sound Question Did varying the frequency result in a different phoneme e g ee Alternative experiment say ah and ee with the same frequency Conclusion Varying the frequency does not result in changes in the phonemes only changes in pitch so frequency is not critical to the difference between phonemes Properties of your voice OK so that was a bust But it turns out that there are more complicated properties of your voice that do seem to matter for phonemes But to see