Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that focuses on the production and classification of the world’s speech sounds.  The production of speech looks at the interaction of different vocal organs, for example the lips, tongue and teeth, to produce particular sounds.  By classification of speech, we focus on the sorting of speech sounds into categories which can be seen in what is called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).  The IPA is a framework that uses a single symbol to describe each distinct sound in the language and can be found in dictionaries and in textbooks worldwide. For example, the noun ‘fish’ has four letters, but the IPA presents this as three sounds: f i ʃ, where ‘ʃ’ stands for the ‘sh’ sound.

Phonetics as an interdisciplinary science has many applications. This includes its use in forensic investigations when trying to work out whose voice is behind a recording.  Another use is its role in language teaching and learning, either when learning a first language or when trying to learn a foreign language. This section of the website will look at some of the branches of phonetics as well as the transcription of speech and some history behind phonetics. 

Speech Sounds and Phonetic Transcription

A letter like ‘p’ or ‘a’ is already a useful model of the sounds of human speech, and indeed we’ll see in Chapter 16 how to map between letters and waveforms. Nonetheless, it is helpful to represent sounds slightly more abstractly. We’ll represent the pronunciation of a word as a string of phones, which are speech sounds, each represented with symbols adapted from the Roman alphabet. The standard phonetic representation for transcribing the world’s

languages is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), an evolving standard first developed in 1888, But in this chapter we’ll instead represent phones with the ARPAbet (Shoup, 1980), a simple phonetic alphabet (Fig. H.1) that conveniently uses ASCII symbols to represent an American-English subset of the IPA.

Many of the IPA and ARPAbet symbols are equivalent to familiar Roman letters. So, for example, the ARPAbet phone [p] represents the consonant sound at the beginning of platypus, puma, and plantain, the middle of leopard, or the end of antelope. In general, however, the mapping between the letters of English orthographyand phones is relatively opaque; a single letter can represent very different soundsin different contexts. The English letter c corresponds to phone [k] in cougar [k uwg axr], but phone [s] in cell [s eh l]. Besides appearing as c and k, the phone [k] canappear as part of x (fox [f aa k s]), as ck (jackal [jh ae k el]) and as cc (raccoon [r aek uw n]). Many other languages, for example, Spanish, are much more transparentin their sound-orthography mapping than English.H