Phonology and morphology glossary

See Optimality Theory.

Typical, most representative, e.g. a canonical iamb.

A set of agreed vowel qualities, first defined by Daniel Jones, that can be used as a language-independent reference for the purpose of describing vowels encountered in speech.

In phonetic or psycholinguistic research, a short sentence in which the target word is embedded. Example: "I said X two times", where X is the target word. Among other things, the goal is to ensure consistent focus, and avoid assimilation across word boundaries as well as list intonation.

A morphological category that encodes information about a word’s grammatical role, e.g., subject, direct object, indirect object, possessor.

A characteristic of the perception of speech sounds. Sounds are said to be perceived categorically if there is a sharp cross-over from one perceptual category (e.g. /t/) to another (e.g. /d/) and if, in addition, human listeners are unable to distinguish between acoustically different sounds that fall in the same category.

A morphological process which turns the meaning of a verb x into a verb 'make, cause x'. E.g. English 'to lay' is an old causative derived from 'to lie'.

A vowel formed with the tongue horizontally positioned in the center of the space for vowel articulation, between front and back (compare mid for the vertical axis).

Speech addressed to children. See also motherese.

A bound morpheme made up of two parts, one that occurs before and one that occurs after the root. E.g. German ge-schrieb-en 'written'.