In this presentation we will discuss Phonological aspects of CA, how phonology can help contrastive analysis and how is it applied in the CA.

1. Phonological CA
By: Adel Rahimi

2. Contrastive Phonetics and Phonology
Phonetics vs. phonology:
Phonetics studies the nature of speech sounds:
• their production by the vocal tract (articulatory phonetics)
• their perception by the auditory system (auditory phonetics)
• their physical properties as sound waves (acoustic phonetics)
Phonology studies the ways in which speech sounds form systems and patterns:
• the relationship between how sounds are pronounced and how they are stored in the mind
• which phonetic distinctions are significant enough to signal differences in meaning
• the ways sounds are organized within words

3. Contrastive Phonetics and Phonology
Three main concentrations:
i. Movement of the speech organs (Articulatory Phonetics)
ii. Vibration of the sound in speech organs (Acoustic phonetics)
iii. The process of Hearing (Auditory Phonetics)

4. Articulatory Phonetics

5. Articulatory Phonetics
Comparing the articulatory grid employed in the IPA; in this articulatory framework
the similar sounds of L1 and L2 are being compared. The feasibility of this task is
guaranteed by the the fact that the world’s languages do tend to employ sounds
produced by a limited number of combinations of articulatory features.

6. Articulatory Phonetics
Generally, articulatory phonetics is concerned with the transformation of
aerodynamic energy into acoustic energy. Aerodynamic energy refers to the airflow
through the vocal tract. Its potential form is air pressure; its kinetic form is the actual
dynamic airflow. Acoustic energy is variation in the air pressure that can be
represented as sound waves, which are then perceived by the human auditory system
as sound

7. Acoustic Phonetics
Human voice spectrogram

8. Acoustic Phonetics
Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic aspects of
speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates properties like the mean squared
amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, or other
properties of its frequency spectrum, and the relationship of these properties to
other branches of phonetics (e.g. articulatory or auditory phonetics), and to abstract
linguistic concepts like phones, phrases, or utterances.

9. Auditory Phonetics

10. Auditory Phonetics
the branch of phonetics dealing with the physiological processes involved in the
reception of speech.

11. Executing CA in sound systems of two languages
1. Drawing up a phonemic inventory of L1 and L2
2. Equating the phonemes interlingually
3. Listing the phonemic variants for L1 and L2
4. Stating the distributional restrictions on the phonemes and allophones of each
language

12. Inventorise the phonemes of L1 and L2
This step consists of equating phonological categories across the two languages.
Note that for most languages phonemic inventory will already have been made
available by a phonologist
• IPA symbols are usually used for representing sounds
• There are diactrics available to indicate any extra features e.g. Nasality (~) and
Length (:)

13. Inventorise the phonemes of L1 and L2
The six vowels and two diphthongs of Persian language

14. Inventorise the phonemes of L1 and L2
English vowels Persian vowels

15. Stating the allophones of each phoneme (a)
For two equated phonemes, one of L1 and one of L2, allophonic variants occur for
one but not the other.
Comparing the laterals /l/ of German and English we discover that German lateral is
always realized by a “clear” [l] while in English there are two allophones in
complementary distribution.
In English: [liԓks] for Links and [fƱɫ] for full
But in German: [liԓks] for links and [fᴈl] for full

16. Stating the allophones of each phoneme (b)
What is an allophone of L1 is a phoneme in L.
Clear /l/ in English and equated with palatal /ļ/ of Russian.
The former has allophonic status, the latter phonemic status.

17. Stating the allophones of each phoneme (c)
This category of contrast applies to pair of L1 and L2 sounds that stand in a one-to-one
relationship, not the one-to-many characteristics of category, here the two
equated segments have different absolute statuses in their respective phonological
systems.

18. State the distributional restrictions of allophones
and phonemes of L1 and L2
What is called for now is a detailed and fully explicit account of the environment in
which allophones occur.
Both English and Spanish have /ԓ/ and /n/ sound. The environment determining
occurrence of /ԓ/ are different.

19. Phonological Models
There is two-way choice for phonological models:
 Taxonomic phonology
Aims in the setting out phoneme systems, combinatorial possibilities of phonemes and non-distinctive
variations of these units in different languages
 Generative phonology
Derived from deep-structure phonology by means of transformation and is a component of
generative grammar that assigns the correct phonetic representations to utterances in such a
way as to reflect a native speaker’s internalized grammar

20. Further Reading
• http://www.multicsd.org/?q=node/153
• http://www-
01.sil.org/linguistics/glossaryoflinguisticterms/WhatIsGenerativePhonology.htm
• http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/lili/personen/vgramley/teaching/HTHS/auditory.html