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Branches Phonetics

Branches of Phonetics

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MOHD ZAINUL ISLAM
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27 views3 pages

Branches Phonetics

Branches of Phonetics

Uploaded by

MOHD ZAINUL ISLAM
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Phonetics and phonology

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies the sounds of human speech, It


is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs: their physiological
production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status.

Phonetics as a research discipline has three main branches

1.Articulatory phonetics: the articulation of speech The field of articulatory


phonetics is a subfield of phonetics that studies articulation and ways that humans
produce speech. Articulatory phoneticians explain how humans produce speech
sounds via the interaction of different physiological structures. Generally, articulatory
phonetics is concerned with the transformation of aerodynamic energy into acoustic
energy. Aerodynamic energy refers to the airflow through the vocal tract. Its potential
form is air pressure; its kinetic form is the actual dynamic airflow. Acoustic energy is
variation in the air pressure that can be represented as sound waves, which are then
perceived by the human auditory system as sound

Sound is produced simply by expelling air from the lungs. However, to vary the
sound quality in a way useful for speaking, two speech organs normally move towards
each other to contact each other to create an obstruction that shapes the air in a
particular fashion. The point of maximum obstruction is called the place of
articulation, and the way the obstruction forms and releases is the manner of
articulation. For example, when making a p sound, the lips come together tightly,
blocking the air momentarily and causing a buildup of air pressure. The lips then
release suddenly, causing a burst of sound. The place of articulation of this sound is
therefore called bilabial, and the manner is called stop (also known as a plosive).
2. Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics, which deals with acoustic aspects of
speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates time domain features such as the mean
squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, or
frequency domain features such as the frequency spectrum, or even combined
spectrotemporal features and the relationship of these properties to other branches of
phonetics (e.g. articulatory or auditory phonetics), and to abstract linguistic concepts
such as phonemes, phrases, or utterances.

The study of acoustic phonetics was greatly enhanced in the late 19th century by
the invention of the Edison phonograph. The phonograph allowed the speech
signal to be recorded and then later processed and analyzed. By replaying the
same speech signal from the phonograph several times, filtering it each time
with a different band-pass filter, a spectrogram of the speech utterance could be
built up. A series of papers by Ludimar Hermann published in Pflügers Archiv
in the last two decades of the 19th century investigated the spectral properties of
vowels and consonants using the Edison phonograph, and it was in these papers
that the term formant was first introduced. Hermann also played back vowel
recordings made with the Edison phonograph at different speeds to distinguish
between Willis' and Wheatstone's theories of vowel production.

Further advances in acoustic phonetics were made possible by the development


of the telephone industry. (Incidentally, Alexander Graham Bell's father,
Alexander Melville Bell, was a phonetician.) During World War II, work at the
Bell Telephone Laboratories (which invented the spectrograph) greatly
facilitated the systematic study of the spectral properties of periodic and
aperiodic speech sounds, vocal tract resonances and vowel formants, voice
quality, prosody, etc.
Auditory phonetics is a branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing of speech
sounds and with speech perception. It thus entails the study of the relationships
between speech stimuli and a listener’s responses to such stimuli as mediated by
mechanisms of the peripheral and central auditory systems, including certain cortical
areas of the brain.

Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of


sounds in spoken languages and signs in sign languages. It used to be only the study of
the systems of phonemes in spoken languages (and therefore used to be also called
phonemics, or phonematics), but it may also cover any linguistic analysis either at a
level beneath the word (including syllable, onset and rime, articulatory gestures,
articulatory features, mora, etc.) or at all levels of language where sound or signs are
structured to convey linguistic meaning.

Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in


spoken languages. The building blocks of signs are specifications for movement,
location and hand shape.

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