Aspects of sound phenomena

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 789.

Speech sounds can be analysed from the viewpoint of three apects;acoustic, physiological and articulatory, linguistic.

The articulatory (sound production) aspect -Speech sounds are products of human organs of speech. The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In studying articulation, phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different physiological structures.

The acoustic aspect -Like any other sound of nature speech sounds exist in the form of sound waves and have the same physical properties-frequency, intensity, duration and spectrum.

The research work made in acoustic phonetics is connected with 1) the methods of speech synthesis and perceptual experiment for the study of cues of phonemic distinctions and for the exploration of dif­ferences in tone and stress; 2) the design of speech recognizing ma­chines, the teaching of languages, the diagnosis and treatment of patho­logical conditions involving speech and language.The future work in acoustic phonetics will be connected with brain functioning and ar­tificial intelligence.

The auditory (sound perception) aspect -Speech sounds may also be analyzed from the point of view of perception. The perception of speech sounds involves the activity of our hearing mechanism, which can be viewed in 2 ways.On the one hand, it is a physiological mechanism which reacts to acoustic stimuli: the human ear transforms mechanical vibrations of the air into nervous stimuli and transmits them to the brain. The listener hears the acoustic features of fundamental frequency, formant frequency, intensity and duration in terms of 4 perceptible categories of pitch, quality, loudness and length.

The linguistic aspect - Segmental sounds and prosodic features are linguistic phenomena. Representing language units in actual speech, they perform certain linguistic functions. They constitute the meaningful units-morphemes, words, word-forms, utterances. All the words of a language consist of speech sounds which are grouped and arranged in the way specific for the language and which are unified by stress. All the utterances consist of words, and consequently, of sounds; they are characterized by certain pitch-and-stress patterns, temporal features, rhythm.