phonetics

n. (used with a sing. verb)

1. The branch of linguistics that deals with the sounds of speech and their production, combination, description, and representation by written symbols.
2. The system of sounds of a particular language.

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.

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(fō-net′iks)
n

The study of the production and perception of speech sounds, including individual and group variations and their use in speech.

phonetics [fŏ‐net‐iks], the science devoted to the physical analysis of the sounds of human speech, including their production, transmission, and perception. A pure science connected to acoustics and anatomy, phonetics is concerned with the accurate description of speech sounds as sounds, rather than with the way languages divide sounds up into meaningful units (this being the domain of phonology). A person practising the science of phonetics is a phonetician.

For more information on phonetics, visit Britannica.com.

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.

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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)

— 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.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - fonetik

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

Italiano (Italian)
fonetica

Português (Portuguese)
n. pl. - fonética (f)

Русский (Russian)
фонетика

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

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 음성학, 발음학

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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