Friday, March 21, 2014

Phonetics and Phonology (The Study of the Sound Productions)

Have you ever wondered and given questions to yourself how the sounds are produced when you're speaking? What organs of your speech are involved when you produce vowels or consonants? We have 5 vowels in Bahasa Indonesia, do we have the same numbers of vowels in English? These questions can be answered in through Phonetics and Phonology. Phonetics and Phonology are concerned with speech with the ways in which humans produce and hear speech (Clark & Yallop, 1990:1). These two production and reception of speech sounds in all its complexity. That is, they study the whole process and all the mechanisms involved in the production and reception of speech.

What is the difference between the two? Phonetics is concerned with the anatomy and physiology of speech, with the production organs (Articulatory Phonetics). Therefore, what we are going to focus on is the anatomy of the speech organs involved in the production of sound. Thus, phonetics is simply the study of how the sounds are produced. There are three important aspects of studying phonetics; 1) how the sounds are produced (articulatory phonetics; 2) the physical characteristics of the speech organs to which the sounds are produced (accoustic phonetics), and; 3) how the sounds are perceived (auditory phonetics). What about phonology? Phonology is concerned with the "systems and patterns"  of sounds that occur in the particular language. For instance, we might be interested on the intonation or stress of the sound when we are speaking. However, both disciplines must be studied together. Phonetics and phonology only study the two different aspects of the same reality. In short, speech is complex human phenomenon which involves mental and physical components and both phonetics and phonology aim at accounting for this complexity.

Now we turn to the first discussion on Phonetics. At first, we'll begin with the discussion of the speech organs. Speech organs are the organs needed for the sound production. It is also called the vocal organs. The speech organs are divided into two categories; active and passive articulators. Active articulators are the speech organs that move to passive articulators to produce the speech sounds, in different manners. For instance, the most active articulator refers to the "tongue". Meanwhile, the other two active articulators the lower lip and glottis. Compare to the active articulators, passive articulators refer to the speech organs that remain static during the articulation of the sounds. Upper lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, hard palate, soft palate, uvula, and pharynx wall are passive articulators.


To be continued...

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