Speech has acoustic parameters {phonetics}|, such as amplitude, duration, frequency, and timbre. Acoustic parameters correspond to sound contrasts used to discriminate among speech features. Speech production and perception parameters are the same.
sound types
Sound types are consonants, sonants or semivowels, vowels, stops, continuants, aspirates, voiced, and unvoiced.
categories
People identify and label perceptual features by sharpening boundaries. People can discriminate among features along many dimensions. People group sounds into rhythms based on sound loudness, length, and pitch. Louder, longer, and higher-pitch sounds are accents.
process
Labeling/identifying and discrimination are two aspects of one mechanism. Special mechanisms make and perceive speech. Perhaps, reverse of production gives perception {motor theory of speech perception}.
articulation
Vocal cords, lungs, pharynx, tongue, nose, teeth, and lips make speech sounds. All people can make all speech sounds, but at different pitches and timbres. Lungs, pharynx, tongue, nose, teeth, and lips modify speech sounds. African languages can use clicks. Languages can use inhaled sounds. Nasalization and other vowel modifications do not change speech-sound basis.
phonetic law
Language has sound shifts over time.
statistics
People learn words by sound-sequence frequency distributions.
sciences
People can study acoustic-signal structure {acoustic phonetics} or how people produce sounds {articulatory phonetics}.
animals
Animals can perceive human speech sounds.
Social Sciences>Linguistics>Phonetics
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Date Modified: 2022.0224