Phonetics & Phonology: The Science of Sounds

An Illustration of Speech Production and Perception

What is Phonetics and Phonology?

Phonetics and Phonology is a sub-field in language studies. The core focus here is on the spoken aspect of the languages. In Phonetics and Phonology we study human speech sounds in terms of their production, perception and how humans put different speech sounds in unique speech patterns to produce meaningful speech.

How is Phonetics different from Phonology?

Even though the terms Phonetics and Phonology both represent the study of human speech sounds, they differ in their practices. In Phonetics we study speech sounds from three perspectives.

1. Articulatory Phonetics
   How speech sounds are produced/articulated and by using what organs?
2. Acoustic Phonetics
   How speech sounds travel from the source to the target i.e. speaker to listener?
3. Auditory Phonetics
   How speech sounds are heard and perceived/understood?

Phonetics is the overall general study of the physical properties of the speech sounds. Here we don't discriminate languages because we study the principles which can be applied to all languages.

In Phonology, however we become language specific. We take into consideration one language and see how the speakers of that particular language produce that language and perceive it.

• How speech sounds are put into unique patterns to communicate in that particular language and how the speech mechanics of that language differ from other languages.

So, Phonetics is the general study of universal physical properties of speech sounds.
Phonology is the study of the unique speech patterns of a particular language (often in comparison to other languages).