Branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human language

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phonetics</span>

Phonetics

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. Phonetics deals with two aspects of human speech: production—the ways humans make sounds—and perception—the way speech is understood. The communicative modality of a language describes the method by which a language produces and perceives languages. Languages with oral-aural modalities such as English produce speech orally and perceive speech aurally . Sign languages, such as Australian Sign Language and American Sign Language , have a manual-visual modality, producing speech manually and perceiving speech visually . ASL and some other sign languages have in addition a manual-manual dialect for use in tactile signing by deafblind speakers where signs are produced with the hands and perceived with the hands as well. Language production consists of several interdependent processes which transform a non-linguistic message into a spoken or signed linguistic signal. After identifying a message to be linguistically encoded, a speaker must select the individual words—known as lexical items—to represent that message in a process called lexical selection. During phonological encoding, the mental representation of the words are assigned their phonological content as a sequence of phonemes to be produced. The phonemes are specified for articulatory features which denote particular goals such as closed lips or the tongue in a particular location. These phonemes are then coordinated into a sequence of muscle commands that can be sent to the muscles, and when these commands are executed properly the intended sounds are produced. 