phontics definition

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 2:11 pm

Phonetics (from the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], phōnē, "sound, voice") is a branch of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] that comprises the study of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of human [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], on the other hand, is concerned with abstract, grammatical characterization of systems of sounds.

Contents

History

Phonetics was studied as early as 500 BC in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]'s account of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of consonants in his 5th century BC treatise on [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. The major [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] today order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification. The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] are credited as the first to base a writing system on a phonetic alphabet. Modern phonetics began with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], whose [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (1867) introduced a system of precise notation for writing down speech sounds.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Basic Information

The study of phonetics is a subject of the multiple layered subject
of Linguists that focuses on the sounds that are produced to spoken
words. In this field of research there are three basic areas of study.
• Articulator phonetics- focuses on the vocal structures of the throat that helps someone produce sounds.
• Acoustic phonetics- an area that focuses on the physical structures
of phonetics (the structures of sounds and their placement to produce
words
• Auditory Phonetics- is the study of phonetics that focuses on the
ear and its relationship to speech production and sounds used for
communication.
All parts of phonetics is inter-connected because the process of
human communication is both a system of auditory mechanisms which
correspond to each other and are mediated by wavelength, pitch, and the
other physical properties of sound.
Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet is used as a global standard for
the written application and transcription of a sequence of sounds that
produces words. This type of phonetic alphabet is also used to symbolize
and label the limitation of each world language through its
representation of the unique sound combinations that can be produced for
a given language. Each language uses a limited number of humanly
possible sounds that are grouped into phonemes. Example of phonetics: in
English the speaker does not notice that he always makes a puff of air
when he pronounces the p the word “pin” and never makes the puff with
the p in the word “spin”; for the native speaker the sound is the same.
While other language there may be a difference in pronunciation of the
letter “p” can become a determiner between two different words, In
English the two sounds are considered variations of a single sound, the
phoneme “p”, and as such are allophones.
The difference between phonetics and phonemes

Phonemes include all significant differences of sound, including
features of voicing, place and manner of articulation, accents, and
secondary features of nasalization and labialization. Whereas phonetics
refers to the study of the production, perception, and physical nature
of speech sounds.
Using an Edison phonograph, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] investigated the spectral properties of vowels and consonants. It was in these papers that the term [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
was first introduced. Hermann also played back vowel recordings made
with the Edison phonograph at different speeds in order to test [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] theories of vowel production.
Subfields

Phonetics as a research discipline has three main branches:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is concerned with the articulation of speech: The position, shape, and movement of articulators or [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], such as the lips, tongue, and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is concerned with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of speech: The spectro-temporal properties of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] produced by speech, such as their [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is concerned with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]: the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of speech sounds and the role of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in the same.

Transcription

Main article: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is a system for transcribing sounds that occur in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] or [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. The most widely known system of phonetic transcription, the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (IPA), uses a one-to-one mapping between phones and written symbols.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
The standardized nature of the IPA enables its users to transcribe
accurately and consistently the phones of different languages, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} The IPA is a useful tool not only for the study of phonetics, but also for language teaching, professional acting, and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Applications

Application of phonetics include:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]: the use of phonetics (the science of speech) for forensic (legal) purposes.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]: the analysis and transcription of recorded speech by a computer system.

Relation to phonology

In contrast to phonetics, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
is the study of how sounds and gestures pattern in and across
languages, relating such concerns with other levels and aspects of
language. Phonetics deals with the articulatory and acoustic properties
of speech sounds, how they are produced, and how they are perceived. As
part of this investigation, phoneticians may concern themselves with the
physical properties of meaningful sound contrasts or the social meaning
encoded in the speech signal (e.g. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
etc.). However, a substantial portion of research in phonetics is not
concerned with the meaningful elements in the speech signal.
While it is widely agreed that phonology is grounded in phonetics,
phonology is a distinct branch of linguistics, concerned with sounds and
gestures as abstract units (e.g., [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], etc.) and their conditioned variation (via, e.g., [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], constraints, or [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]).^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} Phonology relates to phonetics via the set of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
which map the abstract representations of speech units to articulatory
gestures, acoustic signals, and/or perceptual representations