PHONETICS

the study of speech sounds and their physiological production and acoustic qualities. It deals with the configurations of the vocal tract used to produce speech sounds (articulatory phonetics), the acoustic properties of speech sounds (acoustic phonetics), and the manner of combining sounds so as to make syllables, words, and sentences (linguistic phonetics). The first phoneticians were Indian scholars who, 2,300 years ago, tried to preserve the correct pronunciation of their Sanskrit holy texts so that the sacred sounds were not modified in transmission. The classical Greeks are credited with being the first to develop a writing system based on a phonetic alphabet. Modern phonetics began with the publication in 1867 of Visible Speech by Alexander Melville Bell; this book introduced a notation for writing down speech sounds with sufficient precision to permit thorough investigation of human phonological activity. The modern emphasis in phonetics is toward developing a system of classification that can permit all human speech sounds to be compared. Linguists Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle put forward a checklist of 30 properties that they maintained can be used to specify every different significant speech sound. Another concern of phonetics is the investigation of the mental processes by which speech is perceived. Some experiments have suggested that people understand speech elements less by identifying their acoustic properties than by identifying the motor activity used in making the utterances; this theory is supported by the observation that people have difficulty hearing the differences between sounds that they themselves are unable to produce in pronunciation. the study of speech sounds and their physiological production and acoustic qualities. It deals with the configurations of the vocal tract used to produce speech sounds (articulatory phonetics), the acoustic properties of speech sounds (acoustic phonetics), and the manner of combining sounds so as to make syllables, words, and sentences (linguistic phonetics). Additional reading D. Abercrombie, Elements of General Phonetics (1967), a readable survey of selected topics; P. Ladefoged, A Course in Phonetics (1975), a foundation in linguistic phonetics; K.L. Pike, Phonetics (1943), and P. Ladefoged, Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics (1971), critical analyses of phonetic theory; R. Jakobson, C.G.M. Fant, and M. Halle, Preliminaries to Speech Analysis (1952), the first major account of distinctive feature theory; N. Chomsky and M. Halle, The Sound Pattern of English (1968), a comprehensive description of English phonology; P. Ladefoged, Elements of Acoustic Phonetics (1962), an introduction to the physics of speech; I. Lehiste (comp.), Readings in Acoustic Phonetics (1967), a collection of major articles; B. Malmberg (ed.), Manual of Phonetics (1968), authoritative chapters on many aspects of phonetics. Acoustic aspects of speech production are also treated in Dennis B. Fry, The Physics of Speech (1979); J.M. Pickett, The Sounds of Speech Communication (1980); Richard M. Warren, Auditory Perception (1982). David Chrystal, A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (1981), covers main topics in articulatory and acoustic phonetics. See also recent issues of these journals: American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) Journal (monthly); and Journal of Speech and Hearing Research (quarterly).