Experimental phonetics

suprasegmentals.

Auditory phonetics is the branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing of speech sounds and with speech perception. It thus entails the study of the relationships between speech stimuli and a listener's responses to such stimuli as mediated by mechanisms of the peripheral and central auditory systems, including certain areas of the brain. It is said to compose one of the three main branches of phonetics along with acoustic and articulatory phonetics, though with overlapping methods and questions.

Every act of speech supposes the presence of at least two persons: one who speaks - a speaker and one who listens - a listener. Phonetics is a branch of linguistics studying language expression which can be pronounced and listened to. All the phonetic units are audible when people speak a language. Pronunciation is a result of a speech noise.Phonetics has the following four main aspects: articulatory (physiological), acoustic (physical), perceptual (auditory) and phonological (social, functional, linguistic).

From the physiological point of view every human sound is a production of complex, definite, strictly coordinated movements and positions of speech organs. The articulatory aspect studies the voice-producing mechanism and the way in which we produce speech sounds. Usually this aspect is called articulatory or physiological phonetics. The founder of modem phonetics, a Great Russian - Polish linguist I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay (1845 - 1929) called it «antropophonics» meaning antropological studies of speech sounds. The articulatory aspect deals with biological, physiological and mental activity necessary for the pronunciation of a language. But the linguistic interpretation of the production of speech sounds makes phonetics a science which is autonomous

from that of physiology and biology. The oldest and most available method of the articulatory phonetics is direct observation, which studies the movements and positions of one's own or other people’s organs of speech pronouncing various speech sounds and judges them by ear. It is a subjective method of phonetics, as our direct observation does not give a concrete description of the production of speech sounds. There are some objective methods of experimental investigation which imply palatography, photography, cinematography, X-ray photography, X-ray cinematography etc.Palatography is inserting an artificial palate into a speaker's mouth. After the pronunciation of the desired sound the artificial palate is removed and one can immediately see what parts have been touched by the tongue. The place of articulation and the degree of rising of the tongue in the mouth are determined. The artificial palate used in the articulation is called a palatogram. It is difficult to study the sounds pronounced in the back part of the mouth. Labial and nasal articulations are not seen in it at all.X-ray photography helps to fix the exact position of the organs of speech in the articulation of speech sounds. The person under examination, who has a literary pronunciation, is called an informant. The focus of the X-ray lamp is directed against the upper molar of the informant. The lips, the tongue and the palate are sprinkled with bithmus solution or with barium which helps to show their position in the X-ray photo as clear as possible. The X-ray negatives are photographed. The drawings based on these photoes serve the purpose of detailed description of the pronunciation of speech sounds (see fig. 3)./л / /е/

The X-ray photoes can be used as reference points for measurements of the shape and distance between the speech mechanisms.There is also the method of X-ray cinephotography of speech organs during the articulation of certain sounds which requires a variable speed (about 50 to 100 frames per second). The X-ray films show the position of speech organs, their frame-by-frame tracing and measurement.With suitable illumination and the selection of a suitable angle some information or the tongue postures and on the oral articulatory channels formed by contact between tongue and roof of mouth can be obtained by direct (cine) photography. It can illustrate also the position of the lips, the opening of the lower jaw. The lip rounding and its protrusion change the shape of the vocal tract. Direct (cine) photography is used as an auxiliary method in X-ray photography but sometimes it is used as a separate method in physiological phonetics. There are other techniques such as laryngoscope, glottography etc. The articulatory aspect uses its own terms: oral, nasal, labial, dorsal, fore-lingual, back lingual, rounded, unrounded etc.