Phonetics and phonology

Phonetics and phonology

Prepared by Mr Raimjonov and Miss Ashirova

Phonetics, the study of speech sounds and their physiological production and acoustic qualities. It deals with the configurations of the vocal tract used to produce speech sounds (articulatory phonetics), the acoustic properties of speech sounds (acoustic phonetics), and the manner of combining sounds so as to make syllables, words, and sentences (linguistic phonetics).

Types of sound language

• 1) Accoustic
• 2)Auditory
• 3) Articulatory

There are three types of the study of the sounds of language. Acoustic Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of sounds. Auditory Phonetics is the study of the way listeners perceive sounds. Articulatory Phonetics is the study of how the vocal tracts produce the sounds. This article will only describe articulatory phonetics.

Accoustic phonetics

• Acoustic phonetics is the study of the physical properties of speech, and aims to analyse sound wave signals that occur within speech through varying frequencies, amplitudes and durations.

Auditory phonetics

Auditory phonetics is that branch of phonetics concerned with the perception of speech sounds, i.e. with how they are heard

Articulatory phonetics

• Articulatory phonetics refers to the “aspects of phonetics which looks at how the sounds of speech are made with the organs of the vocal tract

Phonology

• Whereas phonetics is the study of sounds and is concerned with the production, audition and perception of of speech sounds (called phones), phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language and operates at the level of sound systems and abstract sound units. Knowing the sounds of a language is only a small part of phonology. This importance is shown by the fact that you can change one word into another by simply changing one sound. Consider the differences between the words time and dime. The words are identical except for the first sound. [t] and [d] can therefore distinguish words, and are called contrasting sounds. They are distinctive sounds in English, and all distinctive sounds are classified as phonemes.

I P A

• International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), an alphabet developed in the 19th century to accurately represent the pronunciation of languages. One aim of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) was to provide a unique symbol for each distinctive sound in a language—that is, every sound, or phoneme, that serves to distinguish one word from another.