Introducing Linguistics Theoretical and Applied Approaches

Chapter 2 provides an overview of phonetics, the study of human speech sounds. It examines two main approaches: articulatory phonetics, which shows how humans produce the sounds of language, and acoustic phonetics, which explains the physical properties of speech sounds. The chapter explains how speech is produced by modifying the shape of the vocal tract and how the articulators interact. We learn why the International Phonetic Alphabet is necessary to study world languages, and ample practice in using the IPA is provided. Practice goes hand in hand with a detailed categorization and description of speech sounds, both consonants and vowels, summarized in charts and figures. The chapter also examines speech processes which lead to changes in the quality of a sound due to the linguistic context. Descriptions and examples of processes such as assimilation, palatalization, nasalization, dissimilation, epenthesis, and deletion, are included in this section. The final part of the chapter introduces readers to acoustic properties of speech sounds by focusing on spectrograms and how to interpret them.