Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that focuses on the sounds of human speech. It is divided into three fields: articulatory, acoustic, and auditory phonetics. Articulatory phonetics studies how sounds are produced by the vocal tract, while acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties of sound waves. Auditory phonetics focuses on how sounds are perceived by the brain.
Phonetics is one of the branches of linguistics. Linguistics is an academic field of inquiry that embraces the study of language as a whole, while phonetics focuses strictly on examining, describing and understanding the sounds of human speech. As a discipline, phonetics is further divided into three different fields – articulatory, acoustic and auditory phonetics – each of which contributes its own perspective to the study of the sounds of human speech. Taken together, these three fields focus on how sounds are produced by the human speech organs, what their actual physical properties are, and ultimately how the listener of sounds perceives them.
Articulatory phonetics is the oldest of the three fields and is the one in which the fundamental concepts of phonetic study were first defined. This field focuses on the speaker and studies how the air and the different parts of the vocal tract move and interact to produce the actual sounds of speech. For example, one could research how the lips, teeth and air are used to produce the sound at the beginning of the word “far”. In addition, this field devotes study to the classification and categorization of speech sounds, such as vowels and consonants, to be able to evaluate and provide therapy for various speech disorders by teaching pronunciation and how to form sounds and words correctly.
Acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties of sound waves that transmit the sounds of speech between the speaker’s mouth, through the air, and into the ears of both the listener and the speaker. This is the newest of the three fields, and its development as a discipline has been accelerated by the invention of the phonograph and the telephone. These inventions made it possible to study the acoustic properties of sound waves using sophisticated tools such as a spectrogram. Researchers in acoustic phonetics will describe airborne sound waves using concepts from mathematics and physics, such as frequency, amplitude and duration, to measure the waves.
Auditory phonetics focuses on hearing the sounds of speech and studies how these sounds are heard through the ear, transmitted along the neural network, then perceived in the brain. Auditory studies are difficult because most processes related to speech perception and analysis occur in the brain, which is more difficult to observe than the vocal tract. A knowledge of auditory phonetics is essential for the study and treatment of deafness.
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