Phonological Development Milestones

Phonetics and Phonology

• Phonetics studies speech sounds' articulation and acoustic properties.
• Phonology examines the organization and function of speech within language systems.

Aspects of Phonetics

• Articulatory phonetics: investigates speech sound production mechanisms.
• Acoustic phonetics: analyzes the physical properties of transmitted speech sounds.
• Auditory phonetics: investigates how the brain perceives speech sounds.

Main Categories of Speech Stream

• Suprasegmentals: features exceeding the word unit (e.g., stress, intonation).
• Segments: distinct speech sounds (phones) and their ideal forms (phonemes).
• Allophones: actual speech sounds representing phonemes.
• Consonants: vocal tract constrictions.
• Vowels: vocal tract with minimal narrowing.
• Glides: consonants with vowel-like qualities.
• Co-articulation: the influence of a neighboring sound on another sound.

Phonetic Transcription

• Phonetic transcription: representing sounds in writing.
• English spelling frequently differs from its pronunciation.
• Homographs: words spelled the same but pronounced differently.
• Homophones: words with similar pronunciations, different spellings.
• Silent letters: letters that do not represent sounds in a word.

Manner of Articulation

• Obstruents: complete or partial blockage of airflow.
• Plosives: complete blockage, followed by release.
• Fricatives: narrow constrictions causing airflow friction.
• Affricates: combination of plosive and fricative.
• Sonorants: relatively open airflow.
• Nasals: resonating in the nasal cavity.
• Approximants: close articulation without friction.
• Liquids: airflow through the tongue.

Vowels

• Vowels are described by tongue height (High, Mid, Low), tongue advancement (Front, Central, Back), and lip rounding (Rounded, Neutral, Spread).

Syllable Structure

• Syllables are units of speech, which can comprise one or more sounds.
• Syllables are usually made up of an onset and a rhyme.
• The rhyme is further subdivided into the nucleus (a vowel) and the coda (consonant sounds after the nucleus).

Phonological Rules

• Phonological rules describe sound changes within languages.
• Assimilation: a sound becomes more similar to the surrounding sound.
• Dissimilation: sounds become less similar to each other.
• Insertion: adding a sound into a word.
• Deletion: removing a sound from a word.
• Metathesis: changing the order of sounds

Implicational Laws

• Implicational laws correlate the presence of one sound in a language with the likelihood of another sound's presence.

Morphology

• Morphology: the study of words' internal structure and formation processes.
• Mental grammar: the mental representation of language systems.
• Lexicons: the internal dictionaries of a language.

Word Formation

• Derivation: creating new words from existing words.
• Open vs Closed lexical categories.
• Roots: core morphemes in words.
• Affixes: prefixes or suffixes added to roots to modify words’ meaning or function.

Morphological Terminology

• Morphemes: smallest units of meaning
• Free morphemes: independently standing words.
• Bound morphemes: cannot be words on their own, act as prefixes or suffixes.
• Roots vs Stems
• Content vs Function words

Morphological Processes

• Affixation: adding prefixes or suffixes.
• Compounding: combining two root words.
• Reduplication: repeating all or part of a word.
• Alternation: morphemes with internal modifications.
• Suppletion: using different forms for words with similar meanings.

Language Typologies

• Analytic languages: rely on word order to express grammatical relations.
• Synthetic languages: rely on affixes to express grammatical relations.
• Agglutinating languages: use bound morphemes with each carrying a specific meaning.
• Polysynthetic language: combine several morphemes into words.

Psycholinguistics vs Neurolinguistics

• Psycholinguistics studies language in the mind.
• Neurolinguistics studies language and the brain.

Syntactic Properties (in depth)

• Agreement: matching grammatical features between sentence constituents.
• Constituents: meaningful units within a sentence.
• Constituency tests: used to determine sentence constituents.
• Syntactic ambiguity: sentences with multiple interpretations.
• Global vs Temporary ambiguity.

Speech Production

• Speech production mechanisms in detail.
• Processes for planning and executing the production of sounds.
• Types of errors in speech production.

Speech Perception

• Stages & process of speech perception
• Categorical perception in speech.
• How speakers/listeners recognize sounds and words.

Language Acquisition

• Types of bilingual learning
• Theories of language acquisition
• Critical period hypothesis
• Innateness vs Environmental impact
• Child-directed speech

Beyond Sentences

• The use of formulaic and patterned language.

Text and Corpus Linguistics

• Cohesion in text.
• Coherence in text.
• Anaphora-reference
• Discourse Markers.
• Corpus Linguistics as a methodology and a resource.