"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 study of speech sounds and their production and perception.
Anatomy and physiology of speech organs: This topic involves understanding the structures and functions of different organs involved in speech production, such as the larynx, vocal cords, tongue, lips, and teeth.
Phonemes and allophones: Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that distinguish meaning in a language, while allophones are the variations of phonemes produced under different circumstances.
Phonology: Phonology is the study of sound patterns in language and the rules governing the distribution of phonemes and allophones.
Acoustics: Acoustics deals with the physical properties of sound, including its production, transmission, and reception.
Articulatory phonetics: This involves studying the mechanisms of speech production, such as the movement of the lips, tongue, and jaw.
Auditory phonetics: Auditory phonetics is the study of how the ear perceives and processes speech sounds.
Vowels and consonants: Vowels are produced with an open vocal tract, while consonants involve obstruction or partial closure of the vocal tract.
Diacritics and transcription: Diacritics are special symbols used to represent sounds or features of sounds that are not part of the standard phonetic alphabet. Transcription is the process of representing spoken language in writing using phonetic symbols.
Historical linguistics: Historical linguistics is the study of language change over time, including changes in pronunciation.
Sociolinguistics: Sociolinguistics explores the relationship between language and society, including the role of dialects, accents, and social factors in shaping language use.
Speech perception: Speech perception is the process of interpreting speech sounds and recognizing words in context.
Speech disorders: Speech disorders refer to any condition that affects a person's ability to produce or understand speech sounds, such as stuttering or aphasia.
Phonetics and language teaching: Phonetics is an essential component of language teaching, as it helps learners to understand the sounds of the language and produce them accurately.
Computational phonetics: Computational phonetics is the use of computer programs to analyze and process speech sounds.
Articulatory Phonetics: The study of the production of speech sounds includes the actions of the vocal organs also known as articulators. This area of Phonetics looks at how speech sounds are generated, for example, where the tongue, lips, and teeth are positioned.
Acoustic Phonetics: This branch deals with the physical properties of sound waves produced by speech sounds that travel through the air and how they interact with each other to form speech patterns.
Auditory Phonetics: The third branch focuses on the perception of sound by the ear and brain. This area of Phonetics looks at how humans recognize, interpret, and understand speech sounds.
"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.