Linguistics - what is phonetics?

 

Phonetics

What is Phonetics?

Phonetics studies the speech sounds of human languages:

 their physical properties

 How they are produced and

 How they are perceived

Phonetics, then, as the study of human speech sounds, aims to provide a set of features to describe, classify and distinguish all the sounds of the human language. 

Major Branches of Phonetics:

Phonetics can be subdivided into three branches: 

Articulatory Phonetics, Acoustic Phonetics and Auditory Phonetics.

Articulatory Phonetics:

Articulatory phonetics is the studies, how speech sounds are produced. It deals with sounds as a matter of anatomy and physiology. 

It studies the organs speech and describing how consonants and vowels are produced or “articulated” in various parts of the mouth and throat. It also focuses on the speech sounds produced by these organs by identifying and classifying the individual sounds.

Acoustic phonetics:

Acoustic Phonetics studies the physical properties of sound and the nature of sound waves.

It investigates how sounds are transmitted through the air from the speaker to the hearer. This study includes amplitude, duration, and frequency.

Auditory Phonetics:

Auditory Phonetics studies of how sounds are perceived by the listener, i.e. how they are received by the ear and decoded by the brain back into the vowels and consonants originally intended by the speaker.