Branches of Phonetics

Branches of Phonetics

Acoustic phonetics:-

          Acoustic phonetics is an important part of phonetics. It is the study of the physics of speech signal. When sound travels through the air from the speaker’s mouth to the hearer’s ear it does so in the form of vibrations in the air. It is possible to measure and analyze the vibration by mathematic techniques, usually using specially developed computer software to produce spectrograms. Acoustic phonetics also studies the relationship between activity in the speaker’s vocal tract, and the resulting sounds. Analysis of speech by acoustic phonetics is claimed to be more objective and scientific than the traditional auditory method which depends on the reliability of the trained human ear. It studies physical properties of speech-sounds.  It describes the physical properties of the stream of sound that flows from the mouth of the speaker.

          Acoustic phonetics has developed to a great extent since the Second Word War. It deals with our sense of hearing. It studies complex sound waves produced in speech side by side. Considerable progress has been made in speech-synthesis also. Acoustic analysis has proved that speech is not made up of a sequence of sound. Acoustic phonetics identifies nasality obstruction and friction. It has achieved a great success in the matters of vowels, but regarding consonants it has not reached final conclusion.

Auditory Phonetics

          Auditory phonetics is the study of hearing and the perception of speech sounds. It is the analysis of speech carried out by the listener’s ear and when the listeners’ brain receives information from the ears. It is said to be receiving auditory information. In practical phonetics, great important has been given to auditory training. This is something known as ear training. It studies auditory impression of quality, pitch and loudness of sounds. We can often tell who is speaking even if we can not make out he exact words. We speak loudly or softly, slowly and rapidly, in a high Pitch or a low one that way we can identify speaker and to some extent his mood also. A recent research shows that he voice quality varied from community to community.

Articulatory Phonetics

          The branch of phonetics that studies articulation and their action is called articulatory phonetics. Articulation means the production of speech sounds. The concept of the articulator is very important in phonetics. We can only produce speech sound by moving parts of our body and this done by the contraction of muscles. Most of the movements relevant to speech take place in the mouth and throat area and the parts of the mouth and throat are that we move when speaking are called articulators. Pronunciation is a complex process. It includes the skill of producing individual sounds correctly. Articulations, juncture, stress, rhythm and intonation are different parts of this process. When we speak, we produce a steam of sounds and say them in groups. We divide a sentence into smaller and smaller groups. For example,, we divide the sentence. ‘This is a book’ into two groups ‘This is’ and ‘book’. Finally we break up the first word into three sounds, the second into two, the third into one and the foruth into three. Thus there are nine sounds in this sentence.

          The speech sounds are produced by some kind sound making apparatus inside the human body. The specific sounds are related to specific movement of the apparatus. Hence is the study of movement of speech organs in the articulation of speech. The organs speech are lung, larynx, soft palate, hard palate, tongue, teeth and lips.