Phonetics vs. Phonology Quiz

Study Notes

Phonology studies language's cognitive system underlying speech, focusing on linguistic encoding/decoding, organization of sounds into a system, sound patterns, and linguistic units (syllables, morphemes).
Phonetics studies speech as a physical manifestation of language, examining the physiology of speech sounds (articulatory and auditory phonetics) and their acoustic properties (acoustic phonetics).
Phonology is a branch of linguistics, often theory-oriented and dealing with abstract entities like phonemes, allophones, syllables, and stress.
Phonetics is an interdisciplinary field (linguistics, physics, anatomy) and data-driven, dealing with observable and measurable entities like vowel length, frequency, loudness, and articulatory movements.

Used in major dictionaries (Oxford, Cambridge, etc.) but less commonly in American dictionaries.
Developed in 1888 by members of the International Phonetic Association.
Based on the Roman alphabet with additional characters, designed to represent each distinctive sound with one unique symbol.
Regularly revised, current version from 2015.
ExtIPA (extensions for disordered speech) and VoQS (voice quality symbols) are notable extensions.
Used by pronunciation dictionaries worldwide.

Speech is often treated as a series of discrete segments (phonemes), but in reality, it's a continuous series of acoustic/articulatory events with overlaps and transitions.
Articulatory gestures between targets are continuous.
Most phoneticians assume speech consists of discrete segments, but there are controversies.
Recent critiques challenge the notion of discrete segments in speech.

Spelling often doesn't map directly onto pronunciation (e.g., spelling variations for single vowels/consonants, irregular mappings).
Recognizing these inconsistencies is crucial for understanding spoken language.
IPA is used to accurately represent speech sounds and overcome the inconsistencies between spelling and pronunciation.