1.

Phonology

Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in natural languages.

(from the Greek: φωνή, phōnē, "voice, sound" and λόγος, lógos, "word, speech,
subject of discussion") is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any
spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a
language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound
system. When describing the formal area of study, the term typically describes
linguistic analysis either beneath the word (e.g., syllable, onset and rime, phoneme,
articulatory gesture, articulatory feature, mora, etc.) or to units at all levels of
language that are thought to structure sound for conveying linguistic meaning. It is
viewed as the subfield of linguistics that deals with the sound systems of languages.
Whereas phonetics is about the physical production, acoustic transmission and
perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function
within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. The term 'phonology'
was used in the linguistics of a greater part of the 20th century as a cover term uniting
phonemics and phonetics. Current phonology can interface with disciplines such as
psycholinguistics and speech perception, resulting in specific areas like articulatory or
laboratory phonology.

An important part of traditional forms of phonology has been studying which sounds
can be grouped into distinctive units within a language. For example, in English, the
[p] sound in "pot" is described as including the articulatory feature of aspirated, while
the word- and syllable-final [p] in "soup" is not aspirated (indeed, it might be realized
as a glottal stop). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as
variations of the same phonological category; that is, the phoneme /p/. Traditionally,
it would be argued that if a word-initial aspirated [p] were interchanged with the
word-final unaspirated [p] in "soup", they would still be perceived by native speakers
of English as 'the same' /p/. (However, speech perception findings now put this theory
in doubt.) Although some sort of 'sameness' of these two sounds holds in English, it is
not universal and may be absent in other languages. For example, in Thai and
Quechua, the difference of aspiration or non-aspiration differentiates phonemes and
coincides with lexical contrasts dependent on minimal differences.

In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning
(the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, i.e. replace one another in
different forms of the same morpheme (allomorphs), as well as, e.g., syllable
structure, stress, accent, and intonation.

The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign
languages, even though the sub-lexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds.
The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality
because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific
ones. On the other hand, it must be noted, it is difficult to analyze phonologically a
 language one does not speak, and most phonological analysis takes place with
recourse to phonetic information.

2. Phonetics
is the study of human speech sounds.
the branch of acoustics concerned with speech processes including its production and
perception and acoustic analysis

3. Phoneme
any of a small set of units, usually about 20 to 60 in number, and different for each
language, considered to be the basic distinctive units of speech sound by which
morphemes, words, and sentences are represented. They are arrived at for any given
language by determining which differences in sound function to indicate a difference
in meaning, so that in English the difference in sound and meaning between pit and
bit is taken to indicate the existence of different labial phonemes, while the difference
in sound between the unaspirated p of spun and the aspirated p of pun, since it is
never the only distinguishing feature between two different words, is not taken as
ground for setting up two different p phonemes in English. Compare DISTINCTIVE
FEATURE

In human language, a phoneme (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound
uttered") is the smallest linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no
semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical
segments themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them. A
morpheme is the smallest structural unit with meaning.

In effect, a phoneme is a group of slightly different sounds which are all perceived to
have the same function by speakers of the language in question. An example of a
phoneme is the /k/ sound in the words kit and krill. (In transcription, phonemes are
placed between slashes, as here.) Even though most native speakers don't notice, in
most dialects, the ks in each of these words are actually pronounced differently: they
are different speech sounds, or phones (which, in transcription, are placed in square
brackets). In our example, the /k/ in kit is aspirated, [kʰ], while the /k/ in krill is not,
[k]. The reason why these different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to
the same phoneme in English is that if an English-speaker used one instead of the
other, the meaning of the word would not change: saying [kʰ] in krill might sound
odd, but the word would still be recognised. By contrast, some other sounds could be
substituted which would cause a change in meaning, producing words like frill
(substituting /f/), grill (substituting /g/) and shrill (substituting /ʃ/). These other
sounds (/f/, /g/ and /ʃ/) are, in English, different phonemes. In some languages,
however, [kʰ] and [k] are different phonemes, and are perceived as such by the
speakers of those languages. Thus, in Icelandic, /kʰ/ is the first sound of kátur
'cheerful', while /k/ is the first sound of gátur 'riddles'.
In many languages, each letter in the spelling system represents one phoneme.
However, in English spelling there is a very poor match between spelling and
phonemes. For example, the two letters sh represent the single phoneme /ʃ/, while the
letters k and c can both represent the phoneme /k/ (as in kit and cat).

Phones that belong to the same phoneme, such as [t] and [tʰ] for English /t/, are called
allophones. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones or
separate phonemes relies on finding minimal pairs: words that differ by only the
phones in question. For example, the words tip and dip illustrate that [t] and [d] are
separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/, in English, whereas the lack of such a contrast in
Korean (/tʰata/ is pronounced [tʰada], for example) indicates that in this language
they are allophones of a phoneme /t/.

In sign languages, the basic elements of gesture and location were formerly called
cheremes (or cheiremes), but general usage changed to phoneme. Tonic phonemes are
sometimes called tonemes, and timing phonemes chronemes.

Some linguists (such as Roman Jakobson, Morris Halle, and Noam Chomsky)
consider phonemes to be further decomposable into features, such features being the
true minimal constituents of language. Features overlap each other in time, as do
suprasegmental phonemes in oral language and many phonemes in sign languages.
Features could be designated as acoustic (Jakobson) or articulatory (Halle &
Chomsky) in nature.