Amy Reese

ESL 4
English Phonology
Chapter 3



Human Communication
Humans love to converse with each other. This includes pushing air from the
lungs up to the mouth and then using the tongue and lips to produce sounds. To
understand the message trying to be conveyed, the listener must decode the
acoustic signal into language for understanding the original idea by the speaker.
Communicating requires listeners to be able to make inferences, using social context
to determine meaning, As for the speaker, gestures can be used to convey their
meaning as well as redundancy to get their point across to the listener. Producing
speech is an acquired capacity and an amazing process that requires the brain
transmitting signals to muscles that control speech.
The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Different languages use
different sets of phonemes to communicate ideas. English has about 40 different
phonemes. To know if a sound can function as a phoneme in a language, a linguist
attempts to find two words that differ by just one sound. These sounds are written
in phonemic transcription by putting them between slash marks (/b/).
The sounds of English are developed by changes in the vocal tract called
voicing. Vowel sounds are known as syllabics and consonant sounds are nonsyllabics.
English vowels consist of long, short, and reduced vowels. Short vowels are called
lax vowels and long vowels are known as tense. Unstressed syllables contain
reduced vowels.
There are six short vowel sounds in the English language and each is spelled
with one letter. Beginning with a vowel and adding a glide produces all seven long
vowels or diphthongs. Reduced vowels are two vowel sounds that occur in words
with two or more syllables. Understanding the vowel phonemes of the English
language can benefit educators working with English learners.
There six different types of consonant phonemes in the English language.
First, stops are phonemes and basically appear in matched pairs, one voiced and the
other voiceless. The three pairs of stops are /p/ and /b/, /t/ and /d/, and /k/ and
/g/. Second, fricatives also come in pairs except /h/. There are nine fricatives in
English. Third, affricates are a combination of a stop and a fricative. There are two
English affricates, /c</ like in church and /j</ like in judge. The next phonemes are
nasals. There are three nasal consonants - /m/ like in mom, /n/ in Nan and [] like
in thing. There are two phonemes called liquids which describe the smooth sounds
associated with /l/ in the beginning and end of lull and /r/ in the beginning and end
of roar. Finally, there are two consonant phonemes called glides. Also called
semivowels, these sounds are the /y/ sound at the beginning of yes and the /w/
sound at the beginning of wet. There are also seven special marks represented in
spelling by digraphs, which are two-letter spellings for one phoneme. As people
learn the phonology of a language, they also master the knowledge of phonotactics,
which are the possible combinations of phonemes of that language.
Finally, tongue twisters help prove the higher limits on the capacity to
produce language easily. Since language production is already a complicated
process, most tongue twisters require the brain to send different patterns to the
muscles at the same time.