Phonemes and allophones

1. When are two speech sounds "different"?

• Case study: Aspirated and unaspirated stops

  • What is aspiration? (FR&H p 245)

• Which of these "p-sounds" are aspirated?

  • pin | spin | cup | cupcake

• So if some "p-sounds" are aspirated and some are not, are they the same sound?

  The answer to this question depends on what language you are talking about.

  • [p] and [p^h] are phonetically different speech sounds.

  • Some languages use this phonetic difference to distinguish words, treating [p] and [p^h] as cognitively/mentally distinct sound categories.
    • Hindi distinguishes [pal] 'take care of' and [p^hal] 'knife blade'
    • Other languages that use aspirated and unaspirated stops to distinguish words include: Thai, Korean, Marathi, Mandarin, Ancient Greek, and Vietnamese (apparently for alveolar stops only)

  • Other languages treat the difference between [p] and [p^h] as a contextual variant of a single sound category.
    • English /p/ is pronounced as [p^h] when it appears in certain sound environments (simplified version: when at the beginning of a word or the beginning of a stressed syllable)
    • German, and to a lesser extent Japanese, are similar to English

  • And there are still other languages that do not use the phonetic category of [p^h] at all
    • Examples: Spanish, French, Italian, Russian. (Ilongo may be like this as well?)

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2. Phonology, phonemes, and allophones

• Phonology is the study of sound patterns in language. One aspect of this is determining which sound categories in a language are cognitively distinct, and which are merely contextual variants.
  • Other domains of phonology include: which sounds are changed into which other sounds under what conditions, and how a language puts consonants and vowels together into syllables.

• The mental sound categories of a language are called the phonemes of the language.

• An actual physical pronunciation of a phoneme is called an allophone of the phoneme.

  • Every phoneme (mental sound category) has at least one allophone (physical pronunciation); many phonemes have more than one allophone.

  • We use different "brackets" to represent them: /.../ for a phoneme; [...] for its allophone(s).

• We can tell when two phonetically distinct sounds in a language belong to different phonemes, because they can be used to distinguish words

  • Hindi has /p/ and /p^h/ as two separate phonemes (see above). /p/ has the allophone [p] and /p^h/ has the allophone [p^h].

  • English has one phoneme /p/ with two allophones, [p] and [p^h]. Whether [p] or [p^h] appears depends on the phonological/phonetic context.

• Warning: Your phonology controls your brain!
  (well, actually, it influences your speech perception)

  • Many people find it hard to believe that two sounds that are allophones for them ("the same sound") could ever be separate phonemes ("different sounds") in another language

  • Many people find it equally hard to believe that two sounds that are separate phonemes for them ("different sounds") could ever be allophones of a single phoneme ("the same sound") in another language

  • This is because your phonological system has an enormous effect on how you mentally categorize a phonetic input

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3. Determining the phonological status of two phonetically distinct sounds

• The same two sounds [X] and [Y] may be separate phonemes in one language, and allophones of a single phoneme in another.

• We have to approach each language separately, and figure out what the status of the two sounds is in that language. (However, two sounds that share very few phonetic properties are not likely to be allophones of the same phoneme in any language.)

• If we find two words that only differ in that one has [X] where the other has [Y], these are known as a minimal pair (of words), and they show us that [X] and [Y] belong to different phonemes (probably /X/ and /Y/).

• If we find that no words ever differ only on the basis of [X] vs. [Y], and we find that [X] only appears in one phonetic/phonological context while [Y] appears in another, then [X] and [Y] are allophones of a single phoneme. (More on this next class.)

• Example: the sounds [k] and [g]

  • Do these two sounds belong to separate phonemes in English? How can we show this?

  • Do these two sounds belong to separate phonemes in Korean? (sound file demo)