PHONETICS: scientific study of any speech sound a person is able to produce. Deals with allophones,
realizations or variants of the phonemes
The central concerns in phonetics are:
- The discovery of how speech sounds are produced
- How the sounds are used in spoken language?
- How we can record speech sounds with written symbols
- How we can hear and recognize different sounds
Speech chain: starts in the speaker’s brain and ends in the listener’s brain
- The articulatory stage: muscles are activated to produce the sound
- The acoustic stage: the movement of these muscles produces sound waves reaches the listener’s ear
- The auditory stage: the vibration of these sound waves reaches the listener’s ear muscles, whose
movements must be interpreted by the listener’s brain
The three main branches of the phonetics:
- Articulatory: speech production and understanding of the anatomy of airstream mechanisms
- Acoustic: speech sound as a physical event, where sound waves has amplitude, intensity, duration and
pitch.
- Auditory: the way in humans perceive speech sounds (the parts of the ear)
Applications of phonetics:
- Forensic phonetics
- Speech recognition
PHONOLOGY: scientific study of the selection, function and organization of speech sounds into a given
system. Deals with phonemes.
Stages:
- First: phonological analysis
- Second: determining which sounds are redundant and which phonemic (identification of minimal pairs)
The allophones of a phoneme can be:
- In complementary distribution: mutually exclusive and never occur in the place of the other
- In free variation: not conditioned by the context and may occur in the same place
