diphthong a phoneme consisting of two individual vowel phonemes joined together in a glide. The first vowel is termed the onglide and the second the offglide elision omission of a sound in speech, because it is followed by another similar sound minimal pair two items whose meanings alter when just one phoneme is changed e.g. bin/pin discrimination the ability to distinguish between two sounds whn both are heard together allophone different articulations of the same phoneme. e.g. the /g/ in goose and the /g/ in geese produce a different lip position. phoneme any of the individual sounds of a language which cannot be altered without changing meaning voiced a sound which is produced by vibrating the vocal cords lingua franca core those phonological features which are deemed to be vital in conveying a clear, unambigous message to other users, especially in NNS - NNS communication non native speaker NNS bilabial a consonant made with the lips e.g. /b/ plosive a consonant made by stopping and then quickly releasing the air e.g. /p/ fricative consonant made by the friction of breath in a narrow opening, producing a turbulent airflow (f, th) nasals sounds which are produced by stopping the airstream from the lungs at some place in the mouth and letting the air escape through the nose. there are three in English - /m/, /n/ and // laterals sounds which are produced by partially blocking the air stream from the lungs, usually by the tongue, by letting it escape at one or both sides of the blockage. /l/ is one of these. unvoiced a sound produced with no vibration of the vocal cords recognition the stage at which the student can identify a particular sound without the help of a contrasting sound assimilation a phonological phenomenom in which a sound alters due to the influence of a preceding or following sound. e.g. greem park stress-timed language a language where stressed syllabels tend to occur at regular intervals, and syllables are not assigned the same stress e.g. English syllable-timed language a language where each syllable tends to take the same length of time to say e.g. Japanese accommodation the process of squeezing together the syllables that occur between stressed syllables, so that each segment of an utterance takes the same time to produce stress or prominence the effect of emphasising ceratin syllables by making them louder or longer, or by increasing their pitch intrusion the adding of a /r/ or /j/ sound between words catenation linking between words intonation the 'music' of speech - the meaningful use that speakers make of changes in their voice pitch. depends on - grammatical functions - attitudinal function - discoursal function pitch the relative level of speech range perceived by the listener pitch range the distance between a speaker's customary top and bottom note. Can apply to languages, not just individuals. e.g. in English it's quite wide, in Italian it's not. tone a movement of pitch. could be a high rise or a low rise or a high fall or a low fall. movement could be rise, fall, fall-rise or rise-fall tone units chunks of language broken up rather like phrases in written English onset syllable the stressed syllable before the tonic syllable tonic syllable the stressed or prominent sylllable wheer the main pitch movement in an utterance takes place