The building blocks of language: describing speech sounds

Phonetics, the study of speech sounds, has three main branches:

1 Articulatory phonetics explores the way in which speech sounds are produced by the vocal organs.

2 Auditory phonetics examines the way in which speech sounds are identified by the hearer.

3 Acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties of sound waves produced by the activity of the vocal organs.

Of these, articulatory phonetics is the longest established. Because the most familiar descriptions of speech sounds are based on their articulation, we shall focus primarily on the articulatory description of the sounds of English.

We will familiarize ourselves with the symbols of the IPA, and learn the bases for the description of vowels and consonants in any language, before considering suprasegmental phenomena such as stress and intonation, which go beyond individual speech sounds.