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Concept
Auditory phonetics
Summary
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.
There is no direct connection between auditory sensations and the physical properties of sound that give rise to them. While the physical (acoustic) properties are objectively measurable, auditory sensations are subjective and can only be studied by asking listeners to report on their perceptions. The table below shows some correspondences between physical properties and auditory sensations.
Auditory phonetics is concerned with both segmental (chiefly vowels and consonants) and prosodic (such as stress, tone, rhythm and intonation) aspects of speech. While it is possible to study the auditory perception of these phenomena without context, in continuous speech all these variables are processed in parallel with significant variability and complex interactions between them. For example, it has been observed that vowels, which are usually described as different from each other in the frequencies of their formants, also have intrinsic values of fundamental frequency (and presumably therefore of pitch) that are different according to the height of the vowel. Thus open vowels typically have lower fundamental frequency than close vowels in a given context, and vowel recognition is likely to interact with the perception of prosody.
If there is a distinction to be made between auditory phonetics and speech perception, it is that the former is more closely associated with traditional non-instrumental approaches to phonology and other aspects of linguistics, while the latter is closer to experimental, laboratory-based study.
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