PHONETICS

PHONETICS. The science or study of the sounds of SPEECH. There are three kinds: (1) Articulatory phonetics, the oldest branch of the subject, which investigates the ways in which sounds are made. Here, the phonetician is trained to recognize, produce, and analyse speech sounds. During the 20c, phonetics has developed as a laboratory subject, in which instruments are used to study the production of speech in the vocal tract: for example, by monitoring the positions and movement of organs, or breath flow and air pressure. Electropalatography uses an artificial PALATE to record, display, and store data on articulatory movements inside the mouth. (2) Acoustic phonetics is concerned with the study of speech as heard: that is, its waveform. For the study of vowels and consonants, the waveform is presented as a spectrogram, on which sounds appear as recognizable visual patterns. For the study of INTONATION, the PITCH, or more precisely the fundamental frequency, usually called Fo (‘ef nought’), is extracted and displayed. A speech workstation is a machine, usually based on a computer, that analyses and displays speech, and allows the user to replay, edit, or annotate the waveform. (3) Experimental phonetics usually involves the manipulation of the waveform and makes psycho-acoustic tests to identify which aspects of sounds are essential for understanding, and for the recognition of linguistic categories. Major applications of phonetics have been made in such areas as LANGUAGE TEACHING, speech therapy, and automatic speech synthesis and recognition. See ACCENT, CONSONANT, INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET, INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ASSOCIATION, PHONEME, PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION, PHONOLOGY, PRONUNCIATION, RHYTHM, STRESS, SWEET, VOICE, VOWEL.