Topic-104: Consonantal Gestures In phonetics and phonology, speech sounds (segments) using basic units of contrast are defined as gestures – they are treated as the abstract characterizations of articulatory events with an intrinsic time dimension. Thus sounds (segments) are used to describe the phonological structure of specific languages and account for phonological variation. In this type of description in phonetics and phonology, sounds are the underlying units which are represented by classes of functionally equivalent movement patterns gestures. Basically, the idea is to review the speech sounds involving their gestural movements and the purpose is to enhance the ability of the experts to describe unfamiliar sounds (of various languages as an appropriate description of unknown sounds is considered impossible) just in order to clarify the variation between varieties (of a language such as English) and among various languages and language families. So involving the place of articulation and manners of articulation, sounds are treated as gestures rather than exact locations and manners.
