Phonetic environment

In phonetics and linguistics the phonetic environment refers to the surrounding sounds of a target speech sound, or target phone, in a word. The phonetic environment of a phone can sometimes determine the allophonic or phonemic qualities of a sound in a given language.

For example, the English vowel [a] in the word 'mat' [mat] has the consonants [m] preceding it and [t] following it. In linguistic notation it is written as /m__t, where the slash can be read as "in the environment," and the underscore represents the target phone's position relative to its neighbours.^[1] The expression therefore reads "in the environment after m and before t."

See also

• Complementary Distribution
• Contrastive Distribution
• Free Variation
• Minimal Pair
• Allophone
• Phoneme
• List of phonetics topics

References

1. Hayes, Bruce (2009). Introductory Phonology (1. publ. ed.). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1405184113.

External links

• What is an environment?