"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 the sounds and sound patterns in languages and how they are produced, transmitted and perceived.
Articulatory phonetics: This topic involves the study of how speech sounds are produced by the articulatory organs in the human vocal tract.
Acoustic phonetics: This topic involves the study of the physical properties of sound waves, such as frequency, amplitude, and duration.
Auditory phonetics: This topic involves the study of the perceptual mechanisms involved in speech perception, including the roles played by the ear, brain, and cognitive processes.
Phonology: This topic involves the study of the sound patterns and rule systems that govern the systematic organization of speech sounds in different languages.
Morphology: This topic involves the study of the structure of words and how they are formed by combining and modifying basic units called morphemes.
Syntax: This topic involves the study of the structure of sentences and how words are arranged and combined together to convey meaning.
Semantics: This topic involves the study of the meaning of words and how they are used to convey different shades of meaning and contribute to the overall interpretation of a sentence or discourse.
Pragmatics: This topic involves the study of how language is used in context to achieve specific communicative goals and to reflect social and cultural norms and conventions.
Sociolinguistics: This topic involves the study of the social and cultural factors that influence language use, variation, and change within different speech communities and across different contexts.
Psycholinguistics: This topic involves the study of how language is processed and acquired by the human brain, including cognitive processes such as memory, attention, and reasoning.
Articulatory Phonetics: Focuses on how speech sounds are produced by the human vocal tract, including air movement, tongue and lip positioning, and coordination.
Acoustic Phonetics: Deals with the physical properties of sound waves produced by speech, including frequency, amplitude, and waveform.
Auditory Phonetics: Looks at how the human ear perceives speech sounds, including the range of audible frequencies and how the brain processes sound information.
Experimental Phonetics: A research-based approach to studying speech sounds, often involving the use of laboratory equipment such as microphones and spectrographs to measure and analyze speech.
Perceptual Phonetics: Examines how listeners process and interpret speech sounds, including factors such as context, cultural background, and individual differences.
Historical Phonetics: Traces the development and evolution of speech sounds over time, including changes in pronunciation and language usage.
Comparative Phonetics: Looks at similarities and differences in speech sounds across languages, including how different languages categorize and represent sounds.
Computational Phonetics: Uses computer algorithms and models to analyze and generate speech sounds, including applications such as speech recognition and generation.
Phonology: Focuses on the patterns and structures of speech sound systems within and across languages, including how different sounds can be combined to create meaningful words and sentences.
"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.