Introduction to Phonetics

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Much of human communication occurs through the production, transmission, perception and decoding of a series of sounds. Phonetics is part of linguistics and deals with the study of linguistic sounds, analysing physiological mechanisms and their physical structure.

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Phonetics is divided into three main fields:

• Articulatory phonetics studies the way in which language sounds are produced by the vocal tract.

• Acoustic phonetics studies the transmission, the physical characteristics of sound that can be measured in sound waves.

• Auditory phonetics studies the perception of language sounds by the auditory apparatus and how it is decoded by the brain.

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Phonetics is fundamental to understanding how sounds are produced and interpreted and plays a key role in the diagnosis and correction of speech disorders.

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The smallest unit of language are the sounds. However, these sounds are not equivalent to letters!

Try breaking down the following word into its different sounds: CHERRY.

The phonetic units in this case are CH-E-RR-Y.

You see that the sounds do not always correspond exactly to the letters. In linguistics, to avoid ambiguities, we use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). The IPA is a universal spelling system providing a symbol for each sound.

In IPA the word CHERRY is spelled: [ʧeri]

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Sounds can be egressive, ingressive or non-pulmonic. Most language sounds are egressive and are therefore produced by the air moving out of the lungs. Ingressive sounds are the opposite, and produced by breathing in. Non-pulmonic sounds, on the other hand, are independent of respiration. In English, all sounds are egressive. Therefore, we will only discuss egressive in this module, but listen to this song to get an idea of what kind of sounds are possible in different languages:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhgb60Qsjrs

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In this module, we will focus on articulatory phonetics, since this is necessary for the basic understanding of the science of phonetics in general. The first two chapters will give you an introduction to the two major categories of sounds: vowels and consonants. You will then move on to suprasegmental aspects of language, called prosody. Finally, you will get a small insight into applied phonetics.

 

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