Experimental phonetics

the representation of French words in writing.

Training in impressionistic phonetics aims to increase students' repertoire of speech sounds beyond what might befound in any particular language. In the ideal case, it would result in mastery of all possible speech sounds of all possible human languages. Students must concentrate on the proprioceptive (tactile and kinaesthetic) sensations associated with producing speech, in order to achieve an increased awareness of, and control over, the movements of their own vocal organs. Training should also result in an increased ability to distinguish between similar sounds and an increased awareness of the relationship between what the speech organs are doing and the auditory percept which results. Thus, the trained impressionistic phonetician, hearing an unfamiliar language for the first time, should be able to make an educated guess as regards what the speaker is doing with his or her vocal organs. This task is made easier if it is possible to look at the speaker. The guess can be refined by repeated listening and by trying to imitate the pronunciation to the satisfaction of a native-speaker informant.

The final elements in impressionistic phonetic training are learning to specify speech sounds in terms of universal articulatory dimensions and to use phonetic notation, most commonly the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Once our trained impressionistic phonetician has worked out what the informant is doing with his or her vocal organs, he or she will want to communicate his or her observations to others. Most commonly, this will involve producing a transcription.of the speech, that is, writing the speech down as a string of individual speech sounds (segments), each represented by its.own alphabetic letter, as in the example of [fæn] above.

Phonetics and phonology are very interesting areas of Linguistics, and are interrelated. They are based on the human speech system, speech perception, native speakers’ intuition, and vocalic and consonantal systems of languages spoken in this world. There are more than six thousand languages spoken in the world. Every language has its own phonemic

inventory, sound system, and phonological and phonetic rules that differ from other languages; most even have distinct orthographic systems. While languages spoken in developed countries are well-studied, those spoken in underdeveloped countries are not. There is a great need to examine them using a scientific approach. These under-studied languages need to be documented scientifically using advanced technological instruments to bring objective results, and linguistics itself provides the scientific basis for the study of a language. Most research studies to date have also been carried out with reference to old or existing written literature in poetry and drama. In the current era of research, scholars are looking for objective scientific approaches, e.g., experimental and instrumental studies that include acoustic research on the sound systems of less privileged languages spoken locally in developing countries. In this context, Sindhi is an example of this phenomenon, and un-researched with reference to syllable structure and the exponents of lexical stress patterns.

Acoustic phonetics comes under the head of speech science, also known as experimental phonetics; this field also includes physiological phonetics. It is the scientific study of human speech sounds, whereas physiological phonetics defines how the nervous system, muscles, and other organs are operated during speech. This science of speech explains how these sounds are made acoustically (Pickett, 1999). Acoustics examines the physical properties of speech sounds with reference to linguistic related acoustic realizations of speech sounds (Davenport & Hannas, 1998).