Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that mainly concerns the articulation, sound wave properties, and perception of speech sounds. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and auditory phonetics. Linguists who specialize in studying these physical properties of vocalization are phoneticians. Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone, an individual speech sound. This differs from the minimal linguistic unit of phonology, the phoneme. Phonemes are abstract, language-specific categorizations of phones and are defined as the smallest units that affect meaning. The communicative modality of a language describes the method by which its production and perception occurs. Languages using oral-aural modalities such as English produce speech orally (using the mouth) and perceive speech aurally (using the ears). Languages using manual-visual modalities such as Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and American Sign Language (ASL) produce sign manually (using the hands) and perceive sign visually (using the eyes). 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. Phonetics also addresses equivalent aspects of sign languages, and it includes the study of tactile signing.