Summary

Phonetics and phonology both study language sound. Phonology examines language sounds as mental units, encapsulated symbolically for example as [æ] or [g], and focuses on how these units function in grammars. Phonetics examines how symbolic sound is manifested as a continuous physical phenomenon. The conversion from the continuous external domain to mental representation requires focusing on the information that is important, which is possible because not all physical properties of speech sounds are cognitively important. One of the goals of phonology is then to discover exactly what these cognitively important properties are, and how they function in expressing regularities about language.