Phonetics and Phonology (eng507)
Topic-015: Types of Phonetic Studies
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| Topic-015: Types of Phonetic Studies Phonetics is the scientific study of speech sounds. It has three major branches articulatory phonetics, acoustics phonetics and auditory phonetics. Phonetics as afield of study has along history, going back certainly to well over two thousand years ago. The central concerns in phonetics are the discovery of how speech sounds are produced how they are used in spoken language how we can record speech sounds with written symbols and how we hear and recognize different sounds. In the first of these areas, when we study the production of speech sounds we can observe what speakers do (articulatory observation) and we can try to feel what is going on inside our vocal tract (kinesthetic observation. The second area is where phonetics overlaps with phonology usually in phonetics we are only interested in sounds that are used in meaningful speech, and phoneticians are interested in discovering the range and variety of sounds used this way in all the known languages of the world. This is sometimes known as linguistic phonetics. Thirdly, there has always been a need for agreed conventions for using phonetic symbols that represent speech sounds the International Phonetic Association has played a very important role in this regard. Finally, the auditory aspect of speech is very important the ear is capable of making fine discrimination between different sounds, so much so that sometimes it is not possible to define in articulatory terms precisely what the difference is (but we can still hear the difference. Phonetics is a multidisciplinary field and it also studies language in terms of general linguistics, language development, ‘dialectology’, ‘sociolinguistics’, ‘psycholinguistics’, anatomy, physiology, developmental psychology, robotics and information processing. There are various other fields which are newly emerging and taking phonetics into account fora detailed analysis such as instrumental phonetics, applied research in speech technology and theoretical and experimental phonetics. Download 1.01 Mb. Share with your friends:
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