"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 how sounds are produced, transmitted, and received in human language.
Articulatory Phonetics: The study of how speech sounds are produced by the movement of various parts of the vocal tract, including the lips, tongue, and vocal cords.
Acoustic Phonetics: The study of the physical properties of speech sounds, such as their frequency, duration, and amplitude.
Auditory Phonetics: The study of how speech sounds are perceived by the human ear and processed by the brain.
Phonetic Transcription: The process of representing speech sounds in writing using a standardized system of symbols.
Phonology: The study of the systematic patterns of sound in language, including the relationships between different phonemes and how they combine to form words.
Morphology: The study of the structure of words and the internal changes that words undergo to convey different meanings.
Syntax: The study of the rules governing the structure of sentences and how words are combined to form meaningful phrases.
Semantics: The study of the meaning of words and how they relate to each other within a language.
Pragmatics: The study of how context affects the interpretation of language, including factors such as intention, tone, and social norms.
Natural Language Processing (NLP): The application of computer algorithms and linguistic theories to the analysis, generation, and synthesis of human language.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): The process of using computer algorithms to recognize and transcribe spoken language.
Speech Synthesis: The process of using computer algorithms to generate synthetic speech that sounds natural and expressive.
Speech Signal Processing: The mathematical and engineering techniques used to extract useful information from speech signals, including noise reduction, signal enhancement, and feature extraction.
Prosody: The study of the rhythm, intonation, and stress patterns of speech, and how these affect meaning and communication.
Corpus Linguistics: The analysis of large collections of actual language use, called corpora, to identify patterns and relationships between linguistic features within a language.
Articulatory Phonetics: This type of phonetics deals with the physical processes and movements involved in the production of speech sounds. It focuses on analyzing how humans use their articulatory organs, such as the tongue, lips, and vocal cords.
Acoustic Phonetics: This type of phonetics focuses on the physical properties of sound waves that are produced during human speech, as well as the ways in which those waves are transmitted and perceived by human ears.
Auditory Phonetics: This type of phonetics focuses on the perception of speech sounds by human listeners, including how different sounds are processed by the human ear and how they are interpreted by the brain.
Cognitive Phonetics: This type of phonetics involves the study of how humans process and comprehend speech sounds, including the ways in which sounds are recognized, categorized, and remembered.
Computational Phonetics: This type of phonetics involves the use of computer algorithms and mathematical models to analyze and simulate the production, perception, and processing of speech sounds.
Diachronic Phonetics: This type of phonetics focuses on the historical development of speech sounds over time, including changes in pronunciation, word stress, and intonation.
Experimental Phonetics: This type of phonetics employs various experimental methods, such as perceptual testing, speech production experiments, and acoustic analyses, to investigate the nature and properties of speech sounds.
Forensic Phonetics: This type of phonetics is used in legal cases to analyze the speech patterns and voice characteristics of individuals, including identification of speakers and detection of language and dialectal differences.
Medical Phonetics: This type of phonetics involves the study of speech disorders and their causes, as well as the development and evaluation of therapeutic techniques for treating these disorders.
Neurolinguistic Phonetics: This type of phonetics focuses on the neurological underpinnings of language processing, including the ways in which the brain processes speech sounds and the neural changes that occur during language acquisition and learning.
Sociolinguistic Phonetics: This type of phonetics is concerned with the social and cultural factors that influence speech production and perception, including regional and social dialects, language attitudes, and language contact.
Segmental Phonetics: This type of phonetics deals with the study of individual speech sounds (or phonemes) and their production, perception, and properties, including articulation, acoustics, and phonological rules.
Suprasegmental Phonetics: This type of phonetics deals with the study of speech features that extend beyond the individual phoneme level, such as intonation, stress, rhythm, and timing.
Comparative Phonetics: This type of phonetics is concerned with the comparative study of speech sounds and phonological systems across different languages and language families, including their similarities, differences, and relationships.
Phonetic Transcription: This involves the process of representing speech sounds using phonetic symbols or alphabets in order to facilitate their study, analysis, and transference. Phonetic transcription leads to better understanding of speech sounds and phonological systems.
"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.