Phonetics

The study of the sounds of language is called phonetics. If you were suddenly placed in a situation in which you could not understand what was being said, the first you would do is try to recognize the sounds people were making.

The important or critical sounds of a language are called phonemes.

The study of phonemes also includes such factors as stress or accent, and pitch and tone. One of the reasons that we have so much trouble pronouncing foreign words is that they include phonemes that are not part of our own language.

One way we can tell the phonemes or important sounds in a language from ones that are not is by recognizing minimal pairs.

This is a way of separating those sounds that change meaning from those that do not. For instance, you can recognize where certain people come from by the way they speak English.

Some people have what we call a British accent and they sound different form people raised in New England, New York City or Georgia. Yet even though they sound different we can still understand what they say because their use of sounds does not change the meaning of their words.

The use of minimal pairs allows us to see what range of sounds can be used in a word without changing its meaning.
Phonetics

Concepts of Phonetics

Concepts of Phonetics
Phonetics is concerned with how speech sounds are produced on the vocal tract as well as with the physical properties of the speech sound waves generated by the larynx and vocal tract.

Whereas the term phonetics usually refers to the study of the articulacy and acoustic properties of sounds, the term phonology, is often used to refer to the abstract principles that govern the distribution of sounds in a language.

Physiology of Speech
At its fundamental level speech signal is a rapidly flowing series of noises that are produced inside the throat, mouth and nasal passages and that radiate out from the mouth and sometimes the nose.

One common sense view is that learning to speak a language requires only the control of a few muscles that move the lips, jaw and tongue.

These anatomical structures are the most easily observed in any case. In reality the situation is much more complex, for over 100 muscles exercise direct and continuous during the production of the sound waves that carry speech.

These sounds waves are produced by complex interaction of:
•An outward flow of air from lungs
•Modifications of the airflow at the larynx
Additional modifications of the airflow by a position and movements of the tongue and other anatomical structures of the vocal tract.
Concepts of Phonetics