ACOUSTIC, AUDITORY & ARTICULATORY PHONETIC

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. Although language is obviously composed of

sound, speech sounds came to be main focus of linguistic investigation only in the 20 th century.
19th century linguist were more interested in written rather than spoken language. Only with the
work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 20 th century did linguist recognize the
primacy of sound in human language and the secondary, superficial nature of writing.
Phonetics has three branches:
1. Acoustic phonetics is the study of the physical properties of sounds, the air wave
frequencies of which sound consist. The frequency of vibration measured in hertz;
volume of sound measured decibels. Instruments used to measure and record speech
sounds include the sound spectrograph, which produces readouts called sound
spectrograms.
2. Auditory phonetics is the study of how sounds are perceived by the human ear or
recognized by the brain. (Mention Oronyms, Mondegreens)
3. Articulatory phonetic is the study of how sounds are produced by the vocal apparatus.
The flow of sound during any given speech act can be divided into units of sound that
recur in the flow of other speech acts. In phonetic transcription using the IPA, these separate
sounds, called phones, are customarily enclosed in square brackets to distinguish them from
letters: [o] = the sound of the vowel in the word rope, not the letter o.
The division of the speech continuum into separate sounds, or phones, is made on the
basis of both articulatory and acoustic data. Auditorily, the sounds seem to the ear to change at a
particular point. Acoustically, this change can be seen on a sound spectrogram. Auditorily, the
change of one sound to another is the result of measurable changes in the movement of the
speech organs.
Data from all three branches of phonetics have revealed another important point about
speech sounds. The phone is about speech sounds. The phone is not the smallest formal unit in
language. Listen to the phones [v] and [u]. Auditorily, we perceive a single unit of sound.
Articulatory, however, more than one part of the vocal apparatus is at work making the sound (cf,

f/v, or i/u). This fact only became apparent during the work of the Prague School linguist in the
earlier part of this century.
Nikolai Trubetskoi noticed that each speech sound or phone is a complex entity. He
called each component of a sound a phonetic feature (voicing, lip rounding are phonetic
features). These features are produced more or less simultaneously rather than consecutively,
which is why we tend to hear them all together as a single unit. After the Second World War,
when sound spectrographs came into general use, the phonetic features posited by the Prague
School linguists actually became visible. They appear as separate formants I the spectrogram of
each sound ([v] has voicing and high static; [u] has a higher first formant and lower second
formant, [i] has a higher second formant and lower first formant)
Thus, not all sounds are equally different, some share virtually no phonetic features,
while others differ in only a single feature. (For instance [f] differs from [v] in only one feature,
whereas [m] and [h] differ in several features). Sound sharing a given phonetic feature can be
grouped together into what are called natural classes (vowels, consonants, nasals, voiced sounds,
etc)
It has be found that a relatively small number of phonetic features were all that was
necessary to describe all sound in any given language. Notice that there are less than half the
number of phonetic features as there are sounds in English. Phonetic features are usually based
on articulatory and sometimes acoustic details (strident vs. non-strident)
One of the Prague linguist, Roman Jakobson, was intrigued by how few phonetic features
there seemed to be in relation to speech sounds in the worlds languages he tried to come up with
a set of universal phonetic features that could be used as tools to describe any sound in any
language of the world. His theory of universal phonetic features failed, however, because as
more languages were described, the number of features kept increasing.