I am a phonologist. Phonology is a branch of linguistics that deals with speech sounds--another branch that deals with speech sounds is phonetics. Phonology deals with abstract aspects of speech sounds, phonetics deals with the production, the  perception and acoustic aspects of speech.

Phonologists are interested in how speech is represented in the brain and what native speakers know about their language. A native speaker of Dutch knows that ‘klik’ is a fine word of Dutch, that ‘krok’ could be a word, it just happens not to exist, but that ‘ktok’ is an impossible word. A k followed by a t can be pronounced: it appears in words such as ‘akte’. How does a native speaker know what sounds may appear where?

Another question is: How do children learn their mother tongue? Children have to learn words to be able to understand what is said to them and to be able to talk. This is not as easy as one might think, since the words in an utterance are not unambiguously separated. If we talk the words are squashed together and some sounds are smeared over two or more words. In a phrase such as ‘You bet ya!’ the final two words are often pronounced as one ‘betcha’. So how does a child figure out the sounds and the words in its language?

These are some of my favorite questions.