English Phonology

Children do not learn the rules of spoken language by explicit instruction,but rather by a combination of copying what they hear, and buildingup mental generalisations based on their experiences. How muchthey are helped in this by some internal structure in the brain dedicatedto language acquisition, which linguists call a Language AcquisitionDevice or Language Faculty, is still a matter of debate.

 

Nonetheless, aspects of spoken language show very strong similaritiesto the types of patterns outlined above for writing. Again, some differencesbetween units matter, because replacing one with another willcause a different meaning to be conveyed in the language in question:replace the initial sound [k] in call with [t], and you have tall, an entirelydifferent English word. Correspondingly, English speakers perceive[k] and [t] as entirely separate sounds, and find them rather easy todistinguish.

The notion of the phoneme is a notoriously difficult one to come toterms with at first. This is not altogether surprising: it isn’t every day thatyou are told you know a whole range of things you didn’t know youknew, and moreover that this knowledge seems likely to be structured in terms of a set of mental units you didn’t know you had. However, the factthat phonemes are so central to phonology means it is well worth givinga few extra examples, to make the concept a little more familiar.

 

First, let us return to Modern English /t/ and /k/, which we havealready met in tall versus call; in fact, we can add Paul to make a minimaltriplet, adding /p/ to our phoneme system. Now hold a piece of paperup in front of your mouth by the bottom of the sheet, so the top is freeto flap about, and try saying Paul, tall, call. You will find that a little puffof air is released after the initial /p/, /t/ and /k/, making the paper moveslightly: this is called aspiration, and signalled in IPA transcription byadding a superscript [h] after the symbol in question. This means that/p/, /t/ and /k/ have the allophones [ph], [th] and [kh] word-initially; theaspiration is most noticeable with [ph], since it is articulated with thelips, nearest to where the air exits.

We have already seen that the phoneme system of a speaker’s nativelanguage, and specifically the difference between pairs of sounds whichcontrast and pairs which do not, strongly condition her perceptions: theearly twentieth century American linguist Sapir concludes that ‘Whatthe native speaker hears is not phonetic elements but phonemes’. However,the phoneme is a psychologically real unit in other ways too, sinceit does not only condition what we hear, but also what we do.