phonetics

n. Phonetics is a field of inquiry concerned with the study of speech sounds by examining the articulatory mechanisms involved in speech production (articulatory phonetics) and in speech perception (auditory phonetics) and the acoustic properties of the signal (acoustic phonetics). Other subfields of phonetics include clinical phonetics, experimental phonetics, and forensic phonetics. One outcome of the systematic study of phonetics has been the classification of speech sounds along a number of phonetic parameters, which predominantly have articulatory foundations with auditory consequences but also have acoustic signatures identifiable in the signal. Consonants are characterized phonetically on three dimensions: their voicing (whether they are produced with phonation), their place of articulation (where in the vocal tract they are produced: at the lips, teeth, palate, etc.), and their manner of articulation (how they are produced: with full or partial closure, with or without turbulence, etc.). Vowels are characterized on the basis of the position of the tongue along a horizontal (front, central, or back) and a vertical (high, mid, low) axis, as well as other parameters, including rounding, nasalization, rhoticity (r-coloring), and tenseness. – EMF

▶ See also ARTICULATION and VOCAL CORDS