INTRODUCTION

- The study of articulation, transmission and

perception of speech sounds
- In order to produce sound humans use
various body parts including the lips, tongue,
teeth, pharynx and lungs.
- Phonetics is the term for the description and
classification of speech sounds, particularly
how sounds are produced, transmitted and
received.
 Study of human speech as a physical
phenomenon

 Phonetics has three subfields

 Articulatory
 Acoustic
 Auditory
 It is the study of how speech sounds are
produced by human vocal apparatus. In
studying articulation, phoneticians attempt to
document how humans produce speech
sounds (vowels and consonants).
 Articulatory phoneticians are interested in:

• Anatomy of vocal organs

• Air stream Mechanism
• Voicing
• Articulation
 Acoustic phonetics investigates properties
like the mean squared amplitude of a
waveform, its duration, its fundamental
frequency, or other properties of its
frequency spectrum, and the relationship of
these properties to other branches of
phonetics (e.g. articulatory or auditory
phonetics), and to abstract linguistic concepts
like phones, phrases, or utterances.
 Speech spectrograph (a machine) is used to
display sounds acoustically: time (duration) of a
sound is displayed horizontally, acoustic
frequency of a sound is displayed vertically, and
intensity is shown by the relative darkness of
the marks.
 In Spectrogram vowels and vowel-like sounds

are darkest and different vowel qualities can be

seen in the changing pattern of black bands
(formants) which represent varying
concentrations of acoustic energy in the vocal
tract.
 Auditory phonetics is a branch of phonetics
concerned with the hearing of speech sounds
and with speech perception.

 Speech perception refers to the processes by

which humans are able to interpret and
understand the sounds used in language. The
study of speech perception is closely linked to
the fields of phonetics and phonology in
linguistics and cognitive psychology and
perception in psychology.
 The mental representation of sounds.
 Phonology is the term used for the study of

the speech sounds used in a particular

language.
 Phonological knowledge permits us to;

• Produce sounds which form meaningful

utterances
• To recognize a foreign accent
• To know what different sound strings may

represent
 By contrast with phonetics, which studies all
possible sounds that the human vocal
apparatus can make, phonology studies only
those contrasts in sound (the phonemes)
which make differences of meaning within
language.
 Phonetics Phonology
• Language independent • Language dependent
• Study of all sounds • Study of only those
sounds that constitute
language and meaning
• Phonology is a subset
of phonetics
 Phoneticians study the physical properties
of sound making
 Phonologists are interested in the sound
system of a language
They want to know
 the function of sounds in the language
 what are the phonemes
 the way sounds can be combined
 how the sounds are realized in different
contexts
 A phoneme is the smallest unit in the sound
system of a language; for example, the t
sound in the word top.

 Various phonetic alphabets have been

developed to represent the speech sounds
in writing through the use of symbols.

 p and b (Roman Alphabets)

 θ and ð (Greek Alphabets)
 Segment is a small unit that can be identified,
either physically or auditorily, in the stream
of speech.
 In Phonetics the smallest perceptible segment

is phone
 Phones refer to the instances of phonemes in

the actual utterances - i.e. the physical

segments.
 In phonology the smallest segment is
phoneme
 A Phoneme is the smallest structural unit that

distinguishes meaning in a language.

 Phonemes are not the physical segments

themselves, but are cognitive abstractions or

categorizations of them.
 The smallest speech sound that has linguistic value
 When a series of phones are similar in terms of
articulation and can be distinguished from another
group in terms of meaning and collocation, the
group is given a name e.g. /t/. This is a phoneme.
 In all human languages, a phoneme is the
smallest unit of speech that distinguishes
meaning
 Phonemes are not the physical segments

themselves, but abstractions of them

 The /t/ sound found in words like tip, stand

writer and cat are examples of phonemes

 In phonetics and linguistics, a phone is any
distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless
of whether the exact sound is critical to the
meanings of words. In contrast, a phoneme is
a speech sound that, in a given language, if it
were swapped with another phoneme, would
change the meaning of the word. Phones are
absolute, not specific to any language, but
phonemes can be discussed only in reference
to specific languages.
 For example, the English
words kid and kit end with two distinct
phonemes, and swapping one for the other
would change the word's meaning. 
 or example, the English word spin consists of

four phones, [s], [p], [ɪ] and [n], and thus it

has the phonetic representation [spɪn]
 We use slashes for phonemes
 We use brackets for phones
 The vowel “ phoneme” in the words bead and

bean is represented as /i/

 The phone is represented as [i]
Thank you