- The branch of linguistics that deals with the sounds of speech and their production, combination, description, and representation by written symbols.
- The system of sounds of a particular language.
phonetics
Dictionary:
pho·net·ics (fə-nĕt'ĭks)  |
| Sci-Tech Encyclopedia: Phonetics |
The science that deals with the production, transmission, and perception of spoken language. At each level, phonetics overlaps with some other sciences, such as anatomy, physiology, acoustics, psychology, and linguistics. In each case, phonetics focuses on phenomena relevant to the study of spoken language.
Speech is normally produced by exhaling air from the lungs through the vocal tract. The vocal tract extends from the larynx through the pharynx and the oral cavity to the lips. If the velum (soft palate) is not raised, the air also passes through the nasal cavities. The shape and size of the oral cavity can be varied by the movement of active articulators: tongue, lips, and velum. See also Palate.
Phoneticians usually describe speech sounds with reference to their point (or place) of articulation and their manner of articulation. The point of articulation of a sound is the place of maximum constriction within the vocal tract. The great majority of sounds are produced by moving some part of the tongue toward some region on the roof of the mouth. Exceptions are articulations involving lips and those sounds in which the vocal folds serve as articulators.
At most of these points of articulation, sounds can be produced with several manners of articulation. One way to classify manners of articulation refers to the degree of stricture employed in producing the sound. Sounds produced with complete constriction of the vocal tract are stops, or plosives. If the closure is incomplete, but the articulators are brought close enough so that the air passing between them is set into turbulent motion, the resultant sounds are fricatives or spirants. If the articulators are approximated, but the constriction remains large enough so that air can pass through without friction, the sounds are called approximants—vowellike sounds functioning as consonants. Most of these consonant sounds can be voiced or voiceless; vowels are normally voiced. The terms “voiced” and “voiceless” refer to the presence and the absence of vocal fold vibration.
Acoustic phonetics deals with the manner in which the spoken message is encoded in the sound waves. According to the generally accepted source-filter theory of speech acoustics, sound is generated at a source (which for phonated speech is constituted by the vibrating vocal folds) and passed through the vocal tract. The opening and closing of the vocal folds create a succession of condensations and rarefactions of air molecules—variations in air pressure—and transform kinetic energy into acoustic energy. The sound wave generated at the glottis can be considered, for practical purposes, a complex periodic wave, and as such it contains energy at frequencies that are multiples of the fundamental frequency (harmonics).
The vocal tract acts as a filter, transmitting more energy at those frequencies that correspond to the resonances of the vocal tract than at other frequencies. Energy concentrations at the resonance frequencies of the vocal tract are referred to as formants.
In principle, the source and filter are independent of each other; consider the fact that the same vowel can be sung at different fundamental frequencies (pitches), and different vowels can be produced at the same pitch. The sound wave can be described by specifying its fundamental frequency, amplitude, and spectrum.
The subject matter of phonetics is not limited to the production and perception of vowels and consonants; of equal importance are such prosodic and suprasegmental aspects of spoken language as duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity, as they determine such linguistically relevant phenomena as tone and intonation, stress and emphasis, and the signaling of various boundaries—boundaries of morphemes and words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. See also Speech.
| Dental Dictionary: phonetics |
(fō-net′iks)
n
n
The study of the production and perception of speech sounds, including individual and group variations and their use in speech.
| Literary Dictionary: phonetics |
phonetics
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: phonetics |
For more information on phonetics, visit Britannica.com.
| Philosophy Dictionary: phonetics |
The study of the characteristics of human sounds, especially those used in speech. Although phonetics is probably the least interesting branch of linguistics to a philosopher, the discovery that individual significant sounds are not physically definable, but exist in context and in contrast with others, was a major impetus to structuralism in many areas. The phoneme is the minimal unit in the sound system of a language.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: phonetics |
phonetics (fōnĕt'ĭks, fə–) , study of the sounds of languages from three basic points of view. Phonetics studies speech sounds according to their production in the vocal organs (articulatory phonetics), their physical properties (acoustic phonetics), or their effect on the ear (auditory phonetics). All phonetics are interrelated, since human articulatory and auditory mechanisms correspond to each other and are mediated by wavelength, pitch, and the other physical properties of sound. Systems of phonetic writing are aimed at the accurate transcription of any sequence of speech sounds; the best known is the International Phonetic Alphabet. Narrow transcription specifies as many features of a sound as can be symbolized, while broad transcription specifies only as many features of a sound as are necessary to distinguish it from other sounds. Each language uses a limited number of the humanly possible sounds grouped into phonemes, and the hearer-speaker is trained from childhood to classify them into these groups, rejecting as nonsignificant all sorts of features actually phonetically present. So the English speaker does not notice that he always makes a puff of air when he pronounces the p of pin and never makes the puff with the p of spin; for him they are the same sound. Yet in some languages (as in Sanskrit) just the presence or absence of that puff in both words would indicate a phonemic difference, and two words might differ in meaning because of the puff. In English the two sounds are considered variations of a single sound, the phoneme p, and as such are allophones. In the other situation, aspirated p (p with a puff) and unaspirated p are not allophones but separate phonemes. Phonemes include all significant differences of sound, including features of voicing, place and manner of articulation, accent, and secondary features of nasalization, glottalization, labialization, and the like. Whereas phonetics refers to the study of the production, perception, and physical nature of speech sounds, phonology refers to the study of how such sounds are combined in particular languages and of how they are used to convey meaning. Systematic sound change through time is treated by comparative and historical linguistics. See grammar; language; writing.
Bibliography
See K. Pike, Phonemics (1947); N. Chomsky and M. Halle, The Sound Pattern of English (1968); P. Ladefoged, A Course in Linguistic Phonetics (1982); G. Pullum and W. Ladusaw, Phonetic Symbol Guide (1986); I. R. MacKay, Phonetics (2d ed. 1987).
| World of the Mind: phonetics |
Phonetics, the science of speech sounds, is traditionally divided into two branches: acoustic, concerned with the structure of the acoustic signal itself, and articulatory, concerned with the way these sounds are produced. The most important initial impetus was to develop a standard means for the accurate and convenient transcription of the sounds of various languages and dialects. Proper transcription was regarded as an essential tool for field linguists and missionaries dealing with new languages, and for recording dialectal variations of known languages (and 'correcting' them — e.g. Henry Sweet 1908). The idea of an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), suitable for all languages, was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in 1886; the International Phonetic Association (which included Paul Passy and Sweet, as well as Jespersen) published the first IPA in 1888. This was based on the articulatory features of the sounds: the place of maximum constriction of the vocal tract, the manner of the constriction (completely closed for consonants like /p/; with the nasal passage open for consonants like /m/, etc.) and the onset of voicing (immediate in the case of /b/, but delayed for /p/). Daniel Jones's classification of the 'cardinal vowels' was similarly based on articulatory features, the height of the tongue, front or back of the mouth, with lips rounded or unrounded. The IPA system enables the transcription of sound distinctions which have no significance for the speaker of one language, though they do for the speaker of another. Thus the initial consonants in 'key' and 'cool' can be heard, and felt, to be different but do not, in English, constitute different phonemes (units of significant sound); in Arabic they do.
Although methods of analysing the frequency components of the acoustic signal had been known since Helmholtz in 1862, no convenient way of plotting frequency, energy, and time was available until the development of the 'sonograph' in the 1940s by R. K. Potter and others. The analysis of the movement of the vocal organs during speech has in recent years been advanced by the use of high-speed film to record the opening and closing of the vocal folds during phonation (though the earliest use of this technique can be traced back to 1913) and by cineradiography. Two surprising and paradoxical results have emerged from these methods of acoustic and articulatory analysis: first, there is no simple correspondence between acoustic parameters and the phenomenological sound. The English phoneme /d/, for example, has a quite different sound depending on the vowel that follows it. Second, there is no simple correspondence between the sound and vocal action used to produce it. These fundamental puzzles have motivated the growth of experimental phonetics, which combines sophisticated analysis and synthesis of speechlike sounds with the investigative procedures of experimental psychology, with the aim of discovering which abstract characterizations of acoustic dimensions are critical in determining the sound contrasts meaningful in language. That is to say, what kinds of representation underlie the perception and production of spoken language?
(Published 1987)
Although methods of analysing the frequency components of the acoustic signal had been known since Helmholtz in 1862, no convenient way of plotting frequency, energy, and time was available until the development of the 'sonograph' in the 1940s by R. K. Potter and others. The analysis of the movement of the vocal organs during speech has in recent years been advanced by the use of high-speed film to record the opening and closing of the vocal folds during phonation (though the earliest use of this technique can be traced back to 1913) and by cineradiography. Two surprising and paradoxical results have emerged from these methods of acoustic and articulatory analysis: first, there is no simple correspondence between acoustic parameters and the phenomenological sound. The English phoneme /d/, for example, has a quite different sound depending on the vowel that follows it. Second, there is no simple correspondence between the sound and vocal action used to produce it. These fundamental puzzles have motivated the growth of experimental phonetics, which combines sophisticated analysis and synthesis of speechlike sounds with the investigative procedures of experimental psychology, with the aim of discovering which abstract characterizations of acoustic dimensions are critical in determining the sound contrasts meaningful in language. That is to say, what kinds of representation underlie the perception and production of spoken language?
(Published 1987)
— Brian Lewis Butterworth
- Bibliography
- Collins, B., and Mees, I. (1999). The Real Professor Higgins: The Life and Career of Daniel Jones.
- MacMahon, M. K. C. (1986). 'The International Phonetic Association: the first 100 years'. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 16.
| Wikipedia: Phonetics |
 |
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (November 2008) |
Phonetics (from the Greek: φωνή, phōnē, "sound, voice") is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech.[1] It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds (phones), and the processes of their physiological production, auditory reception, and neurophysiological perception.
Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in ancient India, with Pāṇini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BC treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification.
Contents |
Transcription
Phonetic transcription is a universal system for transcribing sounds that occur in spoken language. The most widely known system of phonetic transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), uses a one-to-one mapping between phones and written symbols.[2][3] The standardized nature of the IPA enables its users to transcribe accurately and consistently between different languages.[2][4][5] It can also indicate common pronunciations of words (e.g. [ðɪs] for the word "this").
Subfields
Phonetics as a research discipline has three main branches:
- articulatory phonetics is concerned with the articulation of speech: The position, shape, and movement of articulators or speech organs, such as the lips, tongue, and vocal folds.
- acoustic phonetics is concerned with acoustics of speech: The properties of the sound waves, such as their frequency and harmonics.
- auditory phonetics is concerned with speech perception: How sound is received by the inner ear and perceived by the brain.
Applications
Application of phonetics include:
- forensic phonetics: the use of phonetics (the science of speech) for forensic (legal) purposes.
- Speech Recognition: the analysis and transcription of recorded speech by a computer system.
Phonetics and phonology
In contrast to phonetics, phonology is the study of language-specific systems and patterns of sound and gesture, relating such concerns with other levels and aspects of language. While phonology is grounded in phonetics, it has emerged as a distinct area of linguistics, dealing with abstract systems of sounds and gestural units (e.g, phoneme, features, mora, etc.) and their variants (e.g., allophones), the distinctive properties (features) which form the basis of meaningful contrast between these units, and their classification into natural classes based on shared behavior and phonological processes. Phonetics tends to deal more with the physical properties of sounds and the physiological aspects of speech production and perception. It deals less with how sounds are patterned to encode meaning in language (though overlap in theorizing, research and clinical applications are possible).
See also
- List of phonetics topics
- International Phonetic Alphabet
- Speech processing
- Acoustics
- Biometric word list
- Phonetics departments at universities
- X-SAMPA
- NATO Phonetic Alphabet
- Buckeye Corpus
Notes
- ^ O'Grady (2005) p.15
- ^ a b O'Grady (2005) p.17
- ^ International Phonetic Association (1999) Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge University Press.
- ^ Ladefoged, Peter (1975) A Course in Phonetics. Orlando: Harcourt Brace. 2nd ed 1982, 3rd ed. 1993, 4th ed. 2001, 5th ed. Boston: Thomson/Wadsworth 2006. Japanese translation 2000.
- ^ Ladefoged, Peter & Ian Maddieson (1996) The Sounds of the World’s Languages. Oxford: Blackwells.
References
O'Grady, William et al (2005). Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (5th ed.). Bedford/St. Martin's. ISBN 0312419368.
External links
- the Web Site of the Phonetic Sciences Laboratory of the Université de Montréal.
- The International Society of Phonetic Sciences (ISPhS)
- A little encyclopedia of phonetics, Peter Roach, Professor of Phonetics, University of Reading, UK. (pdf)
- The sounds and sound patterns of language U Penn
- UCLA lab data
- UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive
- EGG and Voice Quality (electroglottography, phonation, etc.)
- IPA handbook
- IPA-SAM Phonetic Fonts
- Speech Analysis Tutorial
- Lecture materials in German on phonetics & phonology, university of Erfurt
- Real-time MRI video of the articulation of speech sounds, from the USC Speech Articulation and kNowledge (SPAN) Group
- Beginner's course in phonetics, with some exercises
- Praat - Phonetic analysis software
- SID- Speech Internet Dictionary
- Extensive collection of phonetics resources on the Web (University of North Carolina)
Further reading
- Abercrombie, D. (1967). Elements of General Phonetics. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh.
- Ashby, Michael & Maidment, John. (2005). Introducing Phonetic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-80882-0 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-00496-9 (pbk).
- Catford, J. C. (1977). Fundamental problems in phonetics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-32520-X.
- Clark, John; & Yallop, Colin. (1995). An introduction to phonetics and phonology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19452-5.
- Gussenhoven, C & Broeders, A. (1997). English pronunciation for student teachers. Wolters-Noordhoff BV Groningen, the Netherlands. ISBN 90 01 16703 9
- Hardcastle, William J.; & Laver, John (Eds.). (1997). The handbook of phonetic sciences. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-18848-7.
- Ladefoged, Peter. (1982). A course in phonetics (2nd ed.). London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
- Ladefoged, Peter. (2003). Phonetic data analysis: An introduction to fieldwork and instrumental techniques. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-23269-9 (hbk); ISBN 0-631-23270-2 (pbk).
- Ladefoged, Peter; Ian Maddieson (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19814-8.
- Maddieson, Ian. (1984). Patterns of sounds. Cambridge studies in speech science and communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Laver, J. (1994).Principles of Phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Pike, Kenneth L. (1943). Phonetics: A critical analysis of phonetic theory and a technic for the practical description of sounds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
- Pisoni, David B.; & Remez, Robert E. (Eds.). (2004). The handbook of speech perception. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-22927-2.
- Rogers, Henry. (2000). The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics. Harlow, Essex: Pearson. ISBN 0-582-38182-7.
- Stevens, Kenneth N. (1998). Acoustic phonetics. Current studies in linguistics (No. 30). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-19404-X.
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| Translations: Phonetics |
Nederlands (Dutch)
(studie van) spraakklanken
Français (French)
n. - phonétique, phonétique (transcription)
Deutsch (German)
n. - Phonetik, phonetische Umschrift
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. pl. - φωνητική, φωνολογία, φθογγολογία, φωνητικά σύμβολα
Português (Portuguese)
n. pl. - fonética (f)
Español (Spanish)
n. - fonética
Svenska (Swedish)
n. pl. - fonetik, ljudlära
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
语音学, 发音学
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. pl. - 語音學, 發音學
n. - 語音學, 發音學
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 音声学, 音組織, 音声体系
العربيه (Arabic)
(الجمع) علم الأصوات
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - חקר ההגאים ומיונם, פונטיקה
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Mentioned in
- IPA (abbreviation)
- slieve
- phonetize
- International Phonetic Alphabet (phonetic alphabet and diacritic modifiers)
- sheogue
- anaptotic
- phonetization
- phonetic alphabet
- Passy, Paul Édouard (French philologist)
- polyphone
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