Phonemic vs. Phonetic vs. Phonological

[Lee T]

After reading Ch. 8 of Text-to-speech synthesis, I’m still confused about the difference between a phonemic representation and a phonetic representation. The book says that phonemic is higher-level and easier to work with.

Q1: Does this mean that a phonemic system would split words up by general phoneme and phonetic would go into more detail (about which are aspirated, for example)?

Q2: Also, I don’t remember if the exact term “phonological representation” was used in the text, but it’s another similar word that I sometimes confuse with the other two, so some clarification would be helpful anyway.

[Simon]

Phonemes are abstract linguistic types. They describe how a word breaks down into sound units. This is what the academic subject of Phonology deals with. For example, we find that only certain sequences of phonemes are possible in a given language, and some are “illegal”. We might even try to write a set of phonological rules for a language, which would tell us things like /str/ is legal at the start of English words, but /srt/ is not. These are phonological concepts.

A good way to think about phonemes is in terms of “minimal pairs”. If you can find two distinct words that differ in just one sound, then those two contrastive sounds are phonemes. For example “pat” and “bat” tells us that /p/ and /b/ must be different phonemes, and not just different-sounding variants of the same underlying phoneme.

Phones are concrete, individual sound tokens. They are the physical realisation of an underlying phoneme. This is what the academic subject of Phonetics deals with. Phones may vary in their physical properties depending on context.

We write phonemes within slashes /…/ and phones in square brackets […]

As speech technologists, we a guilty of blurring the boundaries between phonology and phonetics. We just want good engineering solutions to problems such as finding a suitable set of sub-word units that we can statistically model to perform speech recognition.

A1: This webpage from John Coleman gives examples of how phones might vary acoustically, whilst being the same underlying phoneme, and confirms that your idea about aspiration being a phonetic process (in English) is correct.

A2: “phonological representation” means the phonemes, possibly with some structural information, such as how they group in to syllables

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