Cd 668 Chapter 3 Terms

Front 1

Affricates/Affricatives

Back 1

Sounds that are a combination of a stop and fricative. (Such as the voiced sound at the beginning of judge or the unvoiced sound at the beginning of church.)

Front 2

Alveolar

Back 2

Refers to any consonant made with the tongue near or touching the alveolar ridge, behind the upper front teeth. English alveolar consonants include t, d, n, s, and z.

Front 3

Assimilation

Back 3

Changing a sound in a word to make it more similar to an adjacent or nearby sound in that word or a neighboring word. Assimilation leads us to pronounce “greenbeans” as “greembeans.”

Front 4

Avoidance

Back 4

A strategy employed by some children as they acquire the phonology of their language: They may avoid some sounds or sequences, while exploiting others.

Front 5

Bilabial

Back 5

A sound in which the place of articulation includes both lips.
• Such as p or m.

Front 6

Canonical Form

Back 6

A sequence of phonological features expressing the properties that a group of highly similar words have in common. When you take on syllable and tend to repeat the pattern.
• Such as baba or nana.

Front 7

Categorical Discrimination

Back 7

Two sounds with the same magnitude of acoustic difference are heard as different sounds (discriminated) if they fall into different phonemic categories, but they are heard as the same sound if they are from the same phonemic category.

Front 8

Consonant

Back 8

Any speech sound made by constricting the vocal tract enough to impede airflow through the mouth.
• Consonants include stops, affricates, fricatives, nasal stops, and liquids.
• Glides (semi-vowels) are sometimes grouped with consonants.
• Consonants are classified on the basis of three aspects of their production:
o Place of articulation (which articulators are involved)
o Manner of articulation (how the speech sound is produced)
o Voicing (presence or absence of vocal fold vibration)

Front 9

Consonant Cluster

Back 9

Two or more consonants that occur together in a word, without intervening vowels. Permissible sequences and position within the word (initial, medial, or final) are dictated by the phonological rules of the language.

Front 10

Constraint

Back 10

Limits or biases that children bring to the task of acquiring language. A constraint may dictate a cognitive strategy in the interpretation of words. One early constraint leads children to assume that a new word refers to a whole object, rather than to a part of the object.

Front 11

Contrast

Back 11

A principle employed by children in word learning: They assume that words contrast in meaning; no two words have the same meaning.

Front 12

Dummy Syllable

Back 12

A place holder, or empty phonological form. Some children learning language use a dummy syllable in place of all unstressed initial syllables.

Front 13

Free Variation

Back 13

Allaphones that can appear in the same environment without changes in meaning are said to be in free variation. E.g. /t/ can be released, unreleased, aspirated, or unaspirated when one says “hat”.

Front 14

Fricative

Back 14

A speech sound produced partly or wholly by airstream friction, such as /s/ or /v/.

Front 15

Glide

Back 15

A speech sound made with slightly more vocal tract constriction than a vowel and having shorter duration than a vowel. The sounds /j/ and /w/ are glides. They are also referred to as semi-vowels.

Front 16

Glottal

Back 16

Pertaining to the glottis, (the opening at the upper part of the larynx, between the vocal folds).

Front 17

Larynx

Back 17

Creates sounds. It is fairly low in the neck. Since it is low it allows for a significant amount of resonance.

Front 18

High Amplitude Sucking

Back 18

A technique used to study infant perceptual abilities. Typically involves recording an infant’s sucking rate as a measure of her attention to various stimuli.

Front 19

Interdental

Back 19

Speech sound made by placing the tongue between the teeth: The initial sounds of “this” or “thing” in English.

Front 20

Intonational Contour

Back 20

The pattern of rhythmic stress and pitch across an utterance.

Front 21

Jargon

Back 21

A term with several different meanings: In normal adults, jargon refers to a specialized vocabulary associated with the workplace or particular activities; in infants, jargon is a form of babbling with conversational intonation; in patients with aphasia, nonsense words are jargon.

Front 22

Labiodental

Back 22

Any speech sound made by bringing the lips close together or making them touch one another. The English labials are /p/, /b/, and /m/.

Front 23

Liquid

Back 23

A consonantal speech sound made with less oral constriction than a fricative but more constriction than a glide. The English liquids are /l/ and /r/.

Front 24

Minimal Pair

Back 24

A pair of words that differ in meaning and whose sounds are the same except for one phonetic segment. For example, “ram/ran” form a minimal pair differing only in the final consonant; “ram/rim” for a minimal pair differing only with respect to the vowel.

Front 25

Nasal

Back 25

A speech sound made with the velum lowered so that air can escape through the nose. English nasals include /m/, /n/ and the sound at the end of sing.

Front 26

Nonreflexive Vocalization

Back 26

Describing a process that has some voluntary component. Reflexive crying in infants soon develops into nonreflexive crying.

Front 27

Obstruent

Back 27

Any speech sound that constricts the vocal tract enough to cause airstream friction or that closes it off entirely. The obstruents of a language consist of the stops, affricates, and fricatives.

Front 28

Optimality Theory

Back 28

A phonological theory that outlines constraints on pronounceable sounds and sound sequences. It lists typical constraints that speakers prefer not to violate, such as, “every syllable should begin with one consonant followed by a vowel.”

Front 29

Palatal

Back 29

A speech sound made on the hard palate. In English, the initial sound of shirt is palatal.

Front 30

Phoneme

Back 30

A speech sound that can signal a difference of meaning; two similar speech sounds p and b represent different phonemes in English because there are pairs of words with different meanings that have the same phonetic form, except that one contains b where the other contains p: e.g. pet and bet.

Front 31

Phonotactic Constraints

Back 31

The permissible sequences of sounds in a language.

Front 32

Place of Articulation

Back 32

Which articulators are involved in a speech sound.

Front 33

Manner of Articulation

Back 33

How the speech sound is produced.

Front 34

Progressive Phonological Idiom

Back 34

A word in a child’s vocabulary that is pronounced more accurately than most other words of the same general target form. Idioms are an exception to the child’s current set of rules, and are progressive in the sense that they anticipate the ability the child will soon have.

Front 35

Protoword

Back 35

A sequence of sounds (used by a child) that has a relatively consistent meaning but is not necessarily based on any adult word.

Front 36

Reduplicated Babble

Back 36

Babbling in which consonant-vowel combinations are repeated, such as “bababa.” Also called repetitive babbling.

Front 37

Reflexive Vocalization

Back 37

A sound made involuntarily, such as a vegetative sound, a burp, cough, newborn cry and so on.

Front 38

Regression

Back 38

A change backward from behavior that is more adultlike to behavior that is a poorer approximation of the adult model and representative of earlier stages of development.

Front 39

Sound Play

Back 39

Reduplicative babble or repetitive babble.

Front 40

Stop

Back 40

A speech sound characterized by the total interruption of sound coming from the mouth, such as in the phonemes /t/ and /b/ in English.

Front 41

Stress Pattern

Back 41

Greater prominence on one or more syllables in a word; this may be due either to greater actual loudness, a marked change in pitch, or greater length of the syllable.

Front 42

Suprasegmentals

Back 42

Intonation, Stress, Pause, Pitch.

Front 43

Variegated Babble

Back 43

Babble that includes a variety of sounds, such as “babideeboo”.

Front 44

Velar

Back 44

Any speech sound produced by having the back of the tounge touch or come near the underside of the velum, or soft palate. The English velars are the consonants /k/, /g/.

Front 45

Velum

Back 45

Also called the soft palate; the soft extension of the hard palate. The velum plays two major roles as an articulator: First, it can be raised to close off the passage from the pharynx into the nasal cavity and lowered to open this passage. Second, the back of the tongue rises to touch the velum in the production of the velar stops.

Front 46

Voiced

Back 46

A speech sound produced with vocal cord vibration.

Front 47

Unvoiced

Back 47

A speech sound made without vocal cord vibration.

Front 48

Vowel

Back 48

A speech sound made with a relatively unobstructed flow of air. Semivowels have some restriction but the air is not stopped and there are no friction sounds.