Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no turbulence. This class is composed of sounds like and semivowels like and, as well as lateral approximants like.
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans make and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Phoneticians—linguists who specialize in phonetics—study the physical properties of speech. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech, how different movements affect the properties of the resulting sound, or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information. Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language—which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones.
Phonology is a branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds. The term also refers to the sound system of any particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology only related to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages. Now it may relate to
Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics, which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates time domain features such as the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, or frequency domain features such as the frequency spectrum, or even combined spectrotemporal features and the relationship of these properties to other branches of phonetics, and to abstract linguistic concepts such as phonemes, phrases, or utterances.
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds. Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless or voiced.
An obstruent is a speech sound such as, , or that is formed by obstructing airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include both vowels and consonants.
Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was a British linguist and phonetician.
In linguistics, a segment is "any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech". The term is most used in phonetics and phonology to refer to the smallest elements in a language, and this usage can be synonymous with the term phone.
Speech is human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words, and using those words in their semantic character as words in the lexicon of a language according to the syntactic constraints that govern lexical words' function in a sentence. In speaking, speakers perform many different intentional speech acts, e.g., informing, declaring, asking, persuading, directing, and can use enunciation, intonation, degrees of loudness, tempo, and other non-representational or paralinguistic aspects of vocalization to convey meaning. In their speech speakers also unintentionally communicate many aspects of their social position such as sex, age, place of origin, physical states, psychic states, physico-psychic states, education or experience, and the like.
The Sounds of the World's Languages, sometimes abbreviated SOWL, is a 1996 book by Peter Ladefoged and Ian Maddieson which documents a global survey of the sound patterns of natural languages. Drawing from the authors' own fieldwork and experiments as well as existing literature, it provides an articulatory and acoustic description of vowels and consonants from more than 300 languages. It is a prominent reference work in the field of phonetics.
Carol Ann Fowler is an American experimental psychologist. She was President and Director of Research at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut from 1992 to 2008. She is also a Professor of Psychology at the University of Connecticut and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at Yale University. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1971, her M.A University of Connecticut in 1973 and her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Connecticut in 1977.
Louis M. Goldstein is an American linguist and cognitive scientist. He was previously a professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics and a professor of psychology at Yale University, and is now a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. He is a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut and a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Catherine P. Browman (1945–2008) was an American linguist and speech scientist. She was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey and Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut, from which she retired due to illness. While at Bell Laboratories, she was known for her work on speech synthesis using demisyllables. She was best known for development, with Louis Goldstein, of the theory of articulatory phonology, a gesture-based approach to phonological and phonetic structure. The theoretical approach is incorporated in a computational model that generates speech from a gesturally-specified lexicon. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from UCLA in 1978 and was a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
In human speech, egressive sounds are sounds in which the air stream is created by pushing air out through the mouth or nose. The three types of egressive sounds are pulmonic egressive, glottalic egressive, and lingual (velaric) egressive. The opposite of an egressive sound is an ingressive sound, in which the airstream flows inward through the mouth or nose.
In phonetics, a lateral release is the release of a plosive consonant into a lateral consonant. Such sounds are transcribed in the IPA with a superscript ⟨l⟩, for example as in English spotless. In English words such as middle in which, historically, the tongue made separate contacts with the alveolar ridge for the and, , many speakers today make only one tongue contact. That is, the is laterally released directly into the :. While this is a minor phonetic detail in English, it may be more important in other languages.
Georg Heike is a German phonetician and linguist.
Bernd J. Kröger is a German phonetician and professor at RWTH Aachen University. He is known for his contributions in the field of neurocomputational speech processing, in particular the ACT model.
Janet Fletcher is an Australian linguist. She completed her BA at the University of Queensland in 1981 and then moved to the United Kingdom and received her PhD from the University of Reading in 1989.
John Henry Esling, is a Canadian linguist specializing in phonetics. He is a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Victoria, where he taught from 1981 to 2014. Esling was President of the International Phonetic Association from 2011 to 2015 and a co-editor of the 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association.
John David Michael Henry Laver, was a British phonetician. He was Emeritus Professor of Speech Sciences at Queen Margaret University, and served as President of the International Phonetic Association from 1991 to 1995.
