Segmentals and Suprasegmentals

Segmentals and Suprasegmentals

1. Suprasegmentals

   • Stress, tone or word juncture.
   • Longer chuncks of speech.
   • Also called prosodic feature.
   • Not limited to single sounds.
   • Often extend over syllables, words or phrases.
   • Example
     • RECord
       • Noun
         • Meaning an account of facts
     • reCORD
       • Verb
         • Means to set down in writing

2. Segmentals

   • Example
     • pie-buy
       • Differ only in their initial phoneme segment.
         • /p/ vs /b/
       • Their meanings and syntactic categories are different.
   • Vowels and consonants
   • One segment of speech
   • Occur in a certain order relative to one another.
   • Divisible phoneme

3. Provide useful information in spoken word recognition.