Phonetics and Phonology

Explore the place of articulation from glottal to palatal sounds, including bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, palato-alveolar, and palatal, and how the tongue and lips shape consonants.

Explore the manner of articulation by examining stops, nasals, fricatives, affricates, approximants, and laterals, and how vocal-tract closures and releases shape air flow.

Explore how vowel articulation varies by height, backness, roundedness, and tenseness, and distinguish monophthongs from diphthongs, with emphasis on tongue position, lip shape, and vowel length.

Identify voiced and voiceless consonants by the vibration of the vocal cords during pronunciation. Feel throat vibrations with your hand as you compare boo (voiced) and p or k (voiceless), noting there are 15 voiced and nine voiceless consonants.

Compare phonology and phonetics by showing how phonology analyzes the mental organization of a language's sounds and its phonological processes, while phonetics describes broad, objective sound production.

Identify whether two sounds are phonemes or allophones using minimal pair tests and non-overlapping contexts. Learn how substituting one sound for another changes the meaning, signaling phoneme distinctions in context.

Explore minimal pairs by comparing words with the same number of segments, identical in all positions except one, where a single phoneme change alters meaning, illustrating phoneme contrast.

Learn phonological notations and symbols, including environment, change, and boundary markers, and how to use brace and parentheses to write formal phonological rules.

Explore assimilation, dissimilation, epenthesis, and deletion, with examples like good girl and five pieces, and learn to write phonological rules, describe environments, and analyze sounds using distinctive features.

Explore deletion, palatalization, metathesis, and stopping as core phonological processes, with examples such as deleting the final r sound in dinner and a shift from alveolar fricative to palatal.