ABSTRACT
In our discussion of animal communication systems we were not concerned with the units or elements of any given communication system. This reflects a characteristic of many nonlinguistic communication systems. They are not organized in terms of hierarchically related units such as sounds, words, phrases, and sentences. The communication system we call human language has, as one of its most salient characteristics, a hierarchical organization of units. The word is one of those units, and words can be described in at least three ways. One description concerns the meanings any given word “has.” In the next chapter we consider the semantic properties of words and how words are organized in our mental dictionaries. A second property of words concerns their syntactic functions and how words may be combined to form a larger unit, the sentence. These syntactic properties of words are discussed in Chapter 4, where we consider sentences and sentence meanings. The third aspect of words is the sounds they are composed of. In this chapter we describe the sound systems of human languages, taking English as our example, and the speech perception process.
