Phonetics

Phonetics
Phonetic Units

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. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians.

It is divided into three branches:

Articulatory Phonetics (how humans plan and produce speech)
Acoustic Phonetics (the properties of such produced speech)
Auditory Phonetics (how humans perceive speech)

Phonetic Units

Phone: The minimal unit of phonetics, which refers to a speech sound in a language

Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; 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.

Phonetics

Phonetic Units

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