Production of Speech Sounds

            More than half of a human body including the chest, lungs, larynx, pharynx, velum, hard palate, tongue, teeth, lips, nostrils, etc takes part in producing speech sounds. The muscle in our chest are contracted to generate the airflow from the lungs. The air from the lungs passes through the glottis in the larynx and is modified in different way with the opening and the narrowing of the glottal folds. Than the air is partially blocked, fully blocked, pressed, or uninterrupted in the vocal tract, and released abruptly or normally through the mouth or nostril so  as to articulate different speech sounds.

Minimal Pairs

Minimal Pairs:
            If two sounds are phonetically similar and occur in the same phonetic environment, and if the substitution of one sound for the other results in a difference in meaning, then these sounds ate assigned to different phonemes. For example, if [ph] is substitute for the [b] in 'bin', a different word 'pin' results. On the other hand, if [ph] is substituted for the [p] in 'spin', we do not obtain a different word. We have that the conclusion that the [ph] and [b] belong to different phonemes, while [ph] and [p] is belong to same phoneme.




It can easily be shown that two sounds belong to different phonemes if we find two words that differ only in that one word has one of these two sounds in a particular position while the other word has the other sound in the same position. Two such words, for example, 'pin' and 'bin' - which differ only by one sound, are said to constitute a minimal pair.

Phone, Phoneme and Allophone

Phone:
A 'phone' is phonetic unit used to indicate the smallest perceptible discrete segment of speech sounds. For example, in the English language the different ways of pronouncing the consonant phoneme /t/ and /t'/ as in 'ten' and 'pet' respectively are all phone of the consonant phoneme /t/.

Phoneme:




A 'phoneme' is a phonological unit that includes similar sounds or phones and differentiates between two or more words. For example, in English language, the words 'pen' and 'ten' differ only in their initial sounds: 'pen' beginning with /p/, and 'ten' beginning with /t/. Therefore, /p/ and /t/ are two different phonemes.




Allophones:
It is now clear that a phoneme is an abstract unit whereas a phone is the actual realization of a phoneme. A phoneme may have several phones. The phones are called allophones of each other.