Phonetics Lesson 02: Introduction to Phonetics PDF

**[Phonetics Lesson 02]** **[What is Phonetics?]** **Introduction:** The previous course considered the complex way in which spoken discourse and written discourse are inextricably connected. However, linguists from all strands of thought concur that speech is primary and writing is secondary. In...

**[Phonetics Lesson 02]** **[What is Phonetics?]** **Introduction:** The previous course considered the complex way in which spoken discourse and written discourse are inextricably connected. However, linguists from all strands of thought concur that speech is primary and writing is secondary. Infants learn how to speak their mother tongue before they start learning how to write through schooling. The long arc of humankind history reveals that speaking was a primary medium of expression in almost all the ancient civilizations. In many of these earliest cultures, singing, chanting and other forms of oral culture had earned honor-roll status as the main symbolic sources of cultural identity and communication among people. In brief, speaking lies at the heart of all human interactions. **Defining Phonetics:** As of early 1900s, earliest linguists have long been interested in examining how speech sounds are made in many world languages and language varieties. The scientific discipline, which addresses speech articulation, is commonly termed Phonetics, and the specialists working within this linguistic field are called Phoneticians. Linguists posit different definitions for the concept of Phonetics. George Yule (2020), for instance, defines Phonetics as "the general study of the characteristics of speech sounds" (p. 29). A more complex definition is provided by the linguist David Crystal (2008), who notes that phonetics is "the science which studies the characteristics of human sound making, especially those sounds used in speech, and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription" (p. 363). Said plainly, phoneticians employ scientific methods and statistical tools to study the ways in which: 1. World speech sounds, both consonants and vowels, are produced by speakers, transmitted in the form of sound waves and perceived by listeners. 2. The different types of sounds. 3. The main categories of speech sounds. 4. Phonetic transcriptions. O'Grady and Archibald (2015) point out that there are roughly 600 consonants and 200 vowels used in all world languages. Some of these sounds are common among all world languages, such as / s / and / b /, whereas other sounds are language-exclusive. By way of example, the sound / x / can be found in Arabic and Spanish but not in English and French. Furthermore, phoneticians approach speech sounds from three distinct, yet interrelated, perspectives, namely: Articulatory Phonetics, Acoustic Phonetics and Auditory Phonetics. **Phonetics and other Fields:** It is worth noting that specialists and scientists from different strands of thought benefit from the field of phonetics. By way of example, many Quran readers (or reciters) and singers take basic classes in articulatory phonetics or watch online tutorials in order to learn more about how speech sounds are uttered. Several scientific disciplines, such as Speech Therapy, Psychology and Accent Coaching, require a sufficient background knowledge in phonetics (Ashby, 2011). An accent coach, for instance, takes basic classes about how various speech sounds are produced in different speech communities. By the same token, social dialectologists and linguistic anthologists participate in regular workshop trainings in phonetics in order to learn more advanced skills and knowledge about speech perception and identification and the recently developed software programs used for analyzing and coding speech data. Pronunciation training workshops and online websites are so helpful for English teachers, who manage to help their students enhance their accuracy and fluency in the English language. **Branches of Phonetics:** 1. **Articulatory Phonetics:** Articulatory Phonetics, the most widely studied subfield in phonetics, sheds light on speech production, or articulation. Any phonetician or a student of phonetics specialized in this branch seeks to understand the complex mechanisms involved in the production of consonants and vowels, contact between speech articulators and airflow, all of which play a major role in producing speech sounds. The questions: How are speech sounds made? And which speech organs are involved in speech articulation? Are usually investigated by any researcher working within the articulatory phonetics realm. Articulatory Phonetics, it must be noted, is considered as the backbone of the other main subfields of phonetics-Acoustic Phonetics and Auditory Phonetics. 2. **Acoustic Phonetics:** Researchers working within Phonetics realm are concerned, not only with how speakers produce speech sounds, but also how those speech sounds and voices move from the speaker to the hearer in the form of sound waves. This Phonetics subfield is commonly called Acoustic Phonetics or Physics of speech and it essentially addresses "the physical properties of speech sound, as transmitted between mouth and ear" (Crystal, 2008, p. 7). Ashby (2011) points out that researchers tend to measure the sound waves, or the disturbances in the air, by means of many software and applications, such as PRAAT, Audacity and WASP. 3. **Auditory Phonetics:** In stark contrast with Articulatory Phonetics, Auditory Phonetics (or Speech Perception) examines how listeners receive and perceive speech sounds (Ashby, 2011). Said plainly, researchers seek to understand how a single speech sound, be it a vowel or a consonant, is perceived by the listener, and transmitted from the outer ear, through the middle and inner ears to the brain in the form of electric impulses. Phoneticians use several ear trainings and technological programs to understand how we hear voices, on the one hand, and to have a clear image about how the brain understands the meanings of such speech segments and discriminates between various types of sounds, on the other. By the same token, sociolinguists working within Speech Perception field (Campbell-Kibler, 2008) tend to use the same programs and online open sources to gauge the segmental segments and supra segmental features uttered by speakers of various regional, ethnic and social origins. In closing, Articulatory Phonetics, Acoustic Phonetics and Auditory Phonetics represent the three main subfields of phonetics. These three branches tend to approach the same human speech sounds from different, interrelated angles. While Articulatory Phonetics is concerned with speech production, Acoustic Phonetics and Auditory Phonetics focus on speech transmission and perception, respectively.