"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 physical properties.
Articulation: The study of how speech sounds are made using different parts of the mouth, throat, and lungs.
Acoustics: The study of sound waves and their properties, including frequency, amplitude, and resonance.
Phonology: The study of how speech sounds are organized and used in language, including differences between languages and dialects.
Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound in a language that can be used to distinguish meaning between two words.
Allophone: A variation of a phoneme that is used in different contexts or by different speakers.
Vowels: Speech sounds produced with an open vocal tract and without a significant constriction of the lips, tongue, or throat.
Consonants: Speech sounds produced with a constriction of the lips, tongue, or throat that modifies the flow of air from the lungs.
Syllable: A unit of speech that contains one or more vowel sounds and may be surrounded by consonant sounds.
Stress: The emphasis placed on a syllable or word in speech, often determined by the loudness and duration of the sound.
Intonation: The rising and falling of pitch in speech that can convey different meanings or emotions.
Speech perception: The process by which we recognize and interpret speech sounds based on acoustic and contextual information.
Speech production: The process by which we generate speech sounds using the articulators and vocal apparatus.
Dialect: A variety of a language that is characterized by differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.
Accent: A distinctive way of pronouncing words that is associated with a particular region, social group, or language learner.
Speech disorders: Conditions that affect the ability to produce or understand speech sounds, such as stuttering, dysarthria, or apraxia.
"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.