2 Representing Sounds and Words

How language representations connect

Language users recognize and produce words by coordinating knowledge of how expressions sound or are signed, how they are structured, what they mean, and how they are used. These representations are linked rather than isolated. Hearing cats, for example, involves identifying a sound pattern, connecting it to cat and its meaning, and interpreting the plural ending.

From speech signal to sound category

Phonetics describes the physical properties of speech sounds: how they are articulated, the acoustic signals they produce, and how they are perceived. Actual pronunciations vary with speaker, accent, and context.

Phonology concerns how a language organizes sounds into categories and patterns. A phoneme is a contrastive sound category: changing it can distinguish words. In English, /p/ and /b/ contrast in pat and bat. Slashes mark a phonological representation; square brackets conventionally mark a more specific phonetic realization.

A phoneme is not one invariant sound. Its context-dependent or otherwise non-contrastive realizations are called allophones. For example, English /p/ is typically aspirated at the beginning of pin but not after /s/ in spin. English listeners generally treat these pronunciations as instances of the same sound category, not as different words. A mental sound representation therefore captures language-relevant contrasts while allowing ordinary pronunciation variation.

Sound patterns beyond individual sounds

Sound patterns include units larger than individual consonants and vowels, such as syllables, stress, and intonation. These patterns can help listeners locate word boundaries and can distinguish meanings.

The familiar written alphabet is not a direct map of speech. English spellings often represent historical conventions and word structure as well as sound.

Word parts and word formation

A morpheme is a minimal linguistic unit pairing a form with meaning or grammatical function. Free morphemes can stand alone, as book can; bound morphemes must attach to another element, as the plural suffix -s does in books. A word may contain one morpheme or several: book has one, while books has two.

Morphology studies how words are built and how their parts contribute to meaning and grammar. Two important processes are:

• Inflection marks grammatical information without usually creating a new dictionary word. Walk → walked marks past tense, and book → books marks plural.

• Derivation forms a related word and may change its meaning or grammatical category. Kind → kindness and teach → teacher are examples.

A morpheme can have different spoken forms, called allomorphs. The English plural ending is pronounced differently in cats, dogs, and buses, although each form marks plural. Speakers learn these forms and the patterns that help determine when each occurs. Morphological knowledge can help word recognition: listeners and readers may use familiar roots and affixes to interpret complex words, although the degree to which a word is mentally decomposed can vary by word and task.

Word knowledge in the mental lexicon

The mental lexicon is a person's organized knowledge of familiar words and other lexical units; it is not simply a list of definitions. Knowledge associated with a word can include its sound or sign form, meaning, grammatical category, morphological structure, and patterns of use. For literate speakers, stored knowledge may also include spelling information.

Lexical knowledge supports comprehension by helping people recognize a word and access relevant information. It also supports production by helping them select a word and retrieve a form that can be spoken or signed.

The boundaries of a lexical entry are not always obvious. Cat and cats are related forms, and a speaker can produce the plural by combining the familiar word with a productive inflectional pattern. Other forms, such as irregular went, may require more specific learned information. Speakers can also understand a newly encountered complex word by drawing on known parts and word-formation patterns, even if that exact form is unfamiliar.

Access to the mental lexicon is connected and context-sensitive. Words related in sound, meaning, or form can influence one another, and a single word can have more than one meaning. Hearing bank activates a form whose intended meaning is clarified by surrounding words and the situation. The lexicon supplies learned information, while grammatical patterns and context help determine how that information fits into an utterance.

Comprehension and production

In comprehension, a listener maps a variable signal onto sound categories, identifies likely words, uses their morphological structure, and combines lexical meanings with sentence and discourse context. In production, a speaker starts with an intended message, selects words, builds the required grammatical forms, retrieves their sound patterns, and coordinates articulation.

Comprehension and production are not merely the reverse of one another: context, expectation, and the availability of stored forms can affect recognition and production differently.

For example, on hearing The dogs barked, a listener can identify the sound sequence, recognize dog and bark, and use plural -s and past-tense -ed to recover grammatical information. To express the same event, a speaker selects the relevant words and forms, then produces a pronunciation shaped by English sound patterns. This example shows how sound, morphology, words, and meaning work together.

• Allophone

• Allomorph