Phonetics

Phonetics

Languages can basically be thought of as systems - highly complicated ones - which enable us to express our thoughts by means of “vocal noises”, and to extract meaning from the “noises” (speech sounds from now on!) that are made by other people. Linguistics is the study of the nature and properties of these systems, and its various branches focus on different aspects of the communication process.

Phonetics is the branch concerned with human speech sounds, and itself has three different aspects:
• Articulatory Phonetics (the most anatomical and physiological division) describes how vowels
and consonants are produced or “articulated” in various parts of the mouth and throat.
• Acoustic Phonetics (the branch that has the closest afnities with physics) studies the sound
waves that transmit the vowels and consonants through the air from the speaker to the hearer
• Auditory Phonetics (the branch of most interest to psychologists) looks at the way in which the hearer’s brain decodes the sound waves back into the vowels and consonants originally intended by the speaker.

Closely associated with Phonetics is another branch of linguistics known as Phonology. This focuses on the way languages use differences between sounds in order to convey differences of meaning between words, and how each language has its own unique sound pattern. Phonology is really the link between Phonetics and the rest of Linguistics.