Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that mainly concerns the articulation, sound wave properties, and perception of speech sounds. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and auditory phonetics. Linguists who specialize in studying these physical properties of vocalization are phoneticians. Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone, an individual speech sound. This differs from the minimal linguistic unit of phonology, the phoneme. Phonemes are abstract, language-specific categorizations of phones and are defined as the smallest units that affect meaning. The communicative modality of a language describes the method by which its production and perception occurs. Languages using oral-aural modalities such as English produce speech orally (using the mouth) and perceive speech aurally (using the ears). Languages using manual-visual modalities such as Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and American Sign Language (ASL) produce sign manually (using the hands) and perceive sign visually (using the eyes). ASL and some other sign languages have in addition a manual-manual dialect for use in tactile signing by deafblind speakers where signs are produced with the hands and perceived with the hands as well. Phonetics also addresses equivalent aspects of sign languages, and it includes the study of tactile signing.
History
Antiquity The first known study of phonetics was undertaken by Sanskrit grammarians as early as the 6th century BCE. The Hindu scholar Pāṇini is among the most well known of these early investigators. His four-part grammar, written c. 350 BCE, is influential in modern linguistics and still represents "the most complete generative grammar of any language yet written". His grammar formed the basis of modern linguistics and described several important phonetic principles, including voicing. This early account described resonance as being produced either by tone, when vocal folds are closed, or noise, when vocal folds are open. The phonetic principles in the grammar are considered "primitives" in that they are the basis for his theoretical analysis rather than the objects of theoretical analysis themselves, and the principles can be inferred from his system of phonology. The Sanskrit study of phonetics is called Shiksha, which the 1st-millennium BCE Taittiriya Upanishad defines as follows: Om! We will explain the Shiksha. Sounds and accentuation, Quantity (of vowels) and the expression (of consonants), Balancing (Saman) and connection (of sounds), So much about the study of Shiksha. || 1 | Taittiriya Upanishad 1.2, Shikshavalli, translated by Paul Deussen.
Modern Advancements in phonetics after Pāṇini and his contemporaries were limited until the modern era, save some limited investigations by Greek and Roman grammarians. In the millennia between Indic grammarians and modern phonetics, the focus shifted from the difference between spoken and written language, which was the driving force behind Pāṇini's account, and began to focus on the physical properties of speech alone. Sustained interest in phonetics began again around 1800 CE with the term "phonetics" being first used in the present sense in 1841. With new developments in medicine and the development of audio and visual recording devices, phonetic insights were able to use and review new and more detailed data. This early period of modern phonetics included the development of an influential phonetic alphabet based on articulatory positions by Alexander Melville Bell. Known as visible speech, it gained prominence as a tool in the oral education of deaf children. Before the widespread availability of audio recording equipment, phoneticians relied heavily on a tradition of practical phonetics to ensure that transcriptions and findings were able to be consistent across phoneticians. This training involved both ear training—the recognition of speech sounds—as well as production training—the ability to produce sounds. Phoneticians were expected to learn to recognize by ear the various sounds on the International Phonetic Alphabet and the IPA still tests and certifies speakers on their ability to accurately produce the phonetic patterns of English (though they have discontinued this practice for other languages). As a revision of his visible speech method, Melville Bell developed a description of vowels by height and backness resulting in 9 cardinal vowels. As part of their training in practical phonetics, phoneticians were expected to learn to produce these cardinal vowels to anchor their perception and transcription of these phones during fieldwork. This approach was critiqued by Peter Ladefoged in the 1960s based on experimental evidence where he found that cardinal vowels were auditory rather than articulatory targets, challenging the claim that they represented articulatory anchors by which phoneticians could judge other articulations.
Production
Language production consists of several interdependent processes which transform a nonlinguistic message into a spoken or signed linguistic signal. Linguists debate whether the process of language production occurs in a series of stages (serial processing) or whether production processes occur in parallel. 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. The words are selected based on their meaning, which in linguistics is called semantic information. Lexical selection activates the word's lemma, which contains both semantic and grammatical information about the word. After an utterance has been planned, it then goes through phonological encoding. In this stage of language production, the mental representation of the words are assigned their phonological content as a sequence of phonemes to be produced. The phonemes are specified for articulatory features which denote particular goals such as closed lips or the tongue in a particular location. 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. Thus the process of production from message to sound can be summarized as the following sequence:
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