"Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign."
The proper formation and delivery of sounds and words.
Phonetics: The study of speech sounds and their production, transmission, and perception.
Phonology: The study of the sound systems of languages and how they are used to convey meaning.
Articulation: The physical movements involved in producing speech sounds and how they are coordinated.
Dialects: Regional or social variations in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.
Accent: A distinctive way of pronouncing words that is characteristic of a particular language or region.
Intonation: The rise and fall of the voice in speech to convey meaning and emotion.
Stress: The emphasis placed on certain syllables or words in a sentence to convey meaning and focus.
Rhythm: The pattern of stress and intonation in speech that creates a musical quality.
Vowels: The sounds produced by the open vocal tract and the tongue, lips, and jaw movements.
Consonants: The sounds produced by obstructing or restricting the flow of air through the mouth or nose.
Voice quality: The tone, pitch, and resonance of the voice, which can convey information about the speaker's emotions and intentions.
Pronunciation drills: Exercises designed to help learners practice and improve their articulation and pronunciation skills.
Accent reduction: Techniques for modifying or reducing a strong accent in order to improve comprehension and intelligibility.
Communication strategies: Techniques for overcoming communication barriers, such as using simpler vocabulary or gestures to clarify meaning.
Vowels: The basic sounds that make up most words, produced by vibrating the vocal cords while shaping the mouth and tongue to create different sounds.
Consonants: Sounds formed by interrupting or blocking the flow of air from the mouth with the lips, tongue, and teeth.
Diphthongs: A vowel sound that shifts from one location in the mouth to another, typically represented by two letters (e.g., "oi" in "boil").
Syllables: A unit of sound in a word, consisting of one or more vowels usually with accompanying consonants.
Stress: Emphasizing a syllable or word to give it extra importance or meaning.
Pitch: The highness or lowness of a tone, which can change the meaning or emphasis of a word or sentence.
Intonation: The rising and falling pitch patterns used in speech to convey emphasis, emotion, or meaning.
Rhythm: The pattern of stresses and pauses in speech, which can vary depending on the speaker's style, region, or language.
Accent: The distinctive way of pronouncing words and phrases associated with a particular region, culture, or social group.
Pronunciation: The way in which words are spoken or pronounced, including the correct use of stresses, rhythm, and intonation.
"The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech (articulatory phonetics), how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound (acoustic phonetics), or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information (auditory phonetics)."
"The phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones, and it is also defined as the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language."
"Languages with oral-aural modalities such as English produce speech orally (using the mouth) and perceive speech aurally (using the ears). Sign languages, such as Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and American Sign Language (ASL), have a manual-visual modality, producing speech manually (using the hands) and perceiving speech visually (using the eyes)."
"Language production consists of several interdependent processes which transform a non-linguistic message into a spoken or signed linguistic signal. After identifying a message to be linguistically encoded, a speaker must select the individual words—known as lexical items—to represent that message in a process called lexical selection."
"During phonological encoding, the mental representation of the words is assigned their phonological content as a sequence of phonemes to be produced."
"These phonemes are then coordinated into a sequence of muscle commands that can be sent to the muscles, and when these commands are executed properly the intended sounds are produced."
"The modification is done by the articulators, with different places and manners of articulation producing different acoustic results. For example, the words tack and sack both begin with alveolar sounds in English, but differ in how far the tongue is from the alveolar ridge."
"The most common airstream mechanism is pulmonic—using the lungs—but the glottis and tongue can also be used to produce airstreams."
"Language perception is the process by which a linguistic signal is decoded and understood by a listener."
"In order to perceive speech, the continuous acoustic signal must be converted into discrete linguistic units such as phonemes, morphemes, and words."
"Listeners prioritize certain aspects of the signal that can reliably distinguish between linguistic categories."
"While certain cues are prioritized over others, many aspects of the signal can contribute to perception. For example, though oral languages prioritize acoustic information, the McGurk effect shows that visual information is used to distinguish ambiguous information when the acoustic cues are unreliable." Quotes were not provided for questions 11-13 as they do not have specific quotes associated with them.