LING 331 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Consonant Cluster, Phoneme, Language Acquisition Device
Document Summary
The study of phonology tries to answer the following questions: They make use of the available sounds that humans can make and perceive, they take a subset of them and organize them in different ways such that each language has its own particular pattern of sounds. It"s not just that you can"t understand foreign language because they have weird words, but you can"t necessarily understand the individual sounds that are used in this foreign language. There are a bunch of times where similar things seem to happen in unrelated languages the same direction of change tends to show up, sometimes. If we can understand what is going on under the hood" of the languages, then maybe we can understand the language part of the human brain. The human body is capable of producing a great deal of types of speech sounds, and of understand these languages.
