University of El Salvador.

Juan Carlos Andaluz

English Phonology and Morphology group 1.

1. Concerns of phonology:

The most important point to appreciate is that phonology studies symbolic

sounds. They are cognitive abstractions but they are not physical sounds.
Furthermore, it studies three aspects of language: The sounds of a language, rules
for combining sounds and variations in pronunciation.

2. Phonetics- What is a physical sound?

Phonetics is about the concrete, instrumentally measurable physical

properties and productions from a speech. It means that the sound should have
context, otherwise we are not going to be able to communicate by having a
representations of everything that we say.

Acoustics: It is a complex pattern of rapid variations in air, traveling from a sound

source and striking the ear. It is a series of neural signals to be received in the
brain. The sound gets to the brain in different ways like: wave form, sound spectra
and spectrograms.

Articulation: it is a way of arrangement of articulators. The lips, tongue and other

organs of the vocal tract required to produce a particular speech sound. The most
important articulators are the lips, teeth, tongue, palate, velum, pharynx and larynx.

3. The symbolic representation of speech.

The way that is measured objectively using either a spectrogram or an acoustic

wave form. It is the representations of the sequence using frequencies. This helps
to determine where the word started and where it finished. In addition, they are
represented between bars.