Which statement best describes the inventory of phonemes used to differentiate meaning?

• A. Phonetics inventories phonemes.
• B. Phonology inventories phonemes.
• C. Articulation inventories phonemes.
• D. Dysarthria inventories phonemes.

Answer: (B)

The main idea here is that phonology deals with the sound system that distinguishes meaning in a language. It inventories phonemes—the distinct sound units that can change word meaning. For example, in English, the sounds /b/ and /p/ form a pair that can differentiate words like "bat" and "pat," so both are part of the phoneme inventory. Phonetics, by contrast, looks at the actual physical sounds (phones) and their acoustic properties, not necessarily at which ones create meaning. Articulation focuses on how we produce sounds with the speech organs, while dysarthria is about a motor-speech disorder. So describing phonology as inventorying phonemes best captures how we catalog the contrastive units that distinguish meaning in language.