1. The Domain of Phonetics

Learning Objectives

At the end of this topic the student should be able to:

• describe the domain of Phonetics as a scientific discipline
• describe the idea of the speech chain as a descriptive model for speech communication, and also criticise its limitations
• identify some technological applications of Phonetics
• identify some of the key people in the history of the field
• explain the difference between a Phonetic and a Phonological account of a language

Topics

What does Phonetics study?

Phonetics is defined in Wikipedia as:

Phonetics (pronounced /fəˈnɛtɪks/, from the Greek: φωνή, phōnē, 'sound, voice') is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech [...]. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds [...] (phones): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status.

"is a branch of linguistics": reminds us that speech is spoken language, and that to study Phonetics is to study one aspect of human linguistic communication.

"sounds of human speech": here 'sounds' refers to the abstract notion of a 'piece of linguistic code' used in spoken linguistic communication, not just to the physical pressure wave.

"is concerned with the physical properties": Phonetics is about the physical reality of speech production. It is a quantitative, experimental science that uses instrumental methods to explore speech communication.

"speech sounds (phones)": the term 'phone' has come to refer to possible instantiations of phonological units (phonemes) in context.

"production": the use of human biological systems for speech generation.

"acoustic properties": the physical properties of speech sound signals, as might be detected by a microphone.

"auditory perception": the perceptual properties of speech sounds, as processed through the human auditory system and perceived by the brain.

"neurophysiological status": the neuroscience behind the production and perception of speech.

"[...]": the ellipses refer to the study of sign languages. I have never heard of Phonetics being used as the name for this.

There is a problem with this definition. It could be taken to mean that Phonetics is a purely descriptive endeavour: that it just answers the question 'What is speech like?' and not 'How is speech used?' or 'Why does it take the form it does?'. But Phonetics is more than descriptive; it is an experimental science that has theories and models that make testable predictions about the form of speech in different communicative situations. It legitimately addresses questions about how and why speech takes the forms it does. Phonetics also asks questions like:

• How is speech planned and executed by the vocal system?
• How and why do speech sounds vary from one context to another?
• How and why do speech sounds vary between speakers?
• How and why do speech sounds vary across speaking styles or emotions?
• How can accents be characterised and why do they develop?
• How do infants learn to use speech?

Phonetics also provides the science behind a multi-billion dollar industry in speech technology. Phonetic ideas have value in building applications such as:

• Machine recognition of speech
• Speech synthesis
• Speaker recognition
• Assessment and therapy for disorders of speech and hearing
• Monitoring of health and stress
• Forensic speaker comparison
• Language pronunciation teaching

The domain of Phonetics is frequently described in terms of a diagram called "The Speech Chain". Here is one version of the speech chain diagram: [image source]



The Speech Chain shows how messages are communicated from speaker to hearer through speech, focussing on the measurable, physical properties of articulation, sound and hearing. While such diagrams provide a useful basis for discussion of the domain of phonetics, they leave out details of the processing necessary for communication to succeed. These are the type of questions that Phonetics should be asking:

• How does a speaker know how to best exploit speech for communication?
• How does the form of speech encode linguistic and paralinguistic information?
• How does variability in the form of speech relate to the communicative intentions of the speaker?
• How does a listener extract linguistic information from a highly variable and unreliable signal?
• How does the listener combine information across modalities of hearing and vision?
• How does the listener reconcile information in the signal with their own knowledge of language and of the world to uncover meaning and intentions?

The list of topics covered in the last International Congress of Phonetic Sciences will give you some idea of the interests of Phoneticians in the 21^st century.

A history of Phonetics in people and ideas

These are some of my personal highlights (with a UCL bias) - let me have your suggestions for additions.

Date	Person or Idea
19th cent.	Alexander Ellis (1814-90) introduced the distinction between broad and narrow phonetic transcription. The former to indicate pronunciation without fine details, the latter to 'indicate the pronunciation of any language with great minuteness'. He also based symbols on the roman alphabet, just the IPA does today. Henry Sweet (1845-1912) introduced the idea that the fidelity of broad transcription could be based on lexical contrast, the basis of the later phonemic principle. He also transcribed the "educated London speech" of his time, giving us the first insights into Received Pronunciation. Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-94) was a physicist who applied ideas of acoustic resonance to the vocal tract and to the hearing mechanism. Thomas Edison (1847-1931) invented sound recording which allowed careful listening and analysis of speech for the first time. Paul Passy (1859-1940) was a founding member and the driving force behind the International Phonetic Association (see Readings). He published the first IPA alphabet in 1888.
1900- 1929	Daniel Jones (1881-1967) founded the Department of Phonetics at UCL and was its head from 1921-1947. He is famous for the first use of the term 'phoneme' in its current sense and for the invention of the cardinal vowel system for characterising vowel quality.
1930s	The First International Congress of Phonetic Sciences was held in 1932 in Amsterdam. Between 1928 and 1939, the Prague School gave birth to phonology as a separate field of study from phonetics. Key figures were Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) and Roman Jakobson (1896-1982).
1940s	Invention of the sound spectrograph at Bell Laboratories, 1946.
1950s	Invention of the pattern playback (a kind of inverse spectrograph) at Haskins Laboratory, 1951. This was used for early experiments in speech perception. Publication of R. Jakobson, G. Fant and M. Halle's Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, 1953. This presented the idea of distinctive features as a way to reconcile phonological analysis with acoustic-phonetic form. Denis Fry (1907-1983) and Peter Denes built one of the very first automatic speech recognition systems at UCL, 1958. Watch a video here. John R. Firth (1890-1960), working at UCL and at SOAS, introduces prosodic phonology as an alternative to monosystemic phonemic analysis.
1960s	Early x-ray movies of speech collected at the cineradiographic facilty of the Wenner-Gren Research Laboratory at Nortull's Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden, 1962. First British English speech synthesized by rule, John Holmes, Ignatius Mattingly and John Shearme, 1964:
1970s	Gunnar Fant (1919-2009) publishes Acoustic Theory of Speech Production, a ground-breaking work on the physics of speech sound production, 1970. Development of the electro-palatograph (EPG), an electronic means to measure degree of tongue-palate contact, 1972. Development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), 1974. Adrian Fourcin, working at UCL, describes the Laryngograph, a non-invasive means of measuring vocal fold contact, 1977. Graeme Clark (1935-), working in Melbourne, Australia led a team that developed the first commercial cochlear implant (bionic ear), 1978.
1980s	Dennis Klatt (-1988) develops the KlattTalk system, which became the basis for the DecTalk product, 1983: Famously, DECTalk has been used by Stephen Hawking for so long that he is now recognised by its synthetic voice. First automatic speech dictation system developed at IBM by Fred Jelinek, Lalit Bahl and Robert Mercer among others, 1985. Kai-fu Lee demonstrates Sphinx, the first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system, 1988.
1990s	Development of Electro-magnetic articulography (EMA), a means to track the motion in real time of small coils attached to the articulators. Publication of the TIMIT corpus of phonetically transcribed speech of 630 American talkers, 1993. This has been used as the basis for much research in acoustic-phonetics. Jim and Janet Baker launch Dragon Systems Naturally Speaking continuous speech dictation system, 1997. Increasing use of functional MRI to study the neural basis for language production and perception, 1997. Ken Stevens (1924-2013) publishes Acoustic Phonetics, the most complete account yet of speech acoustics, 1999.
2000s	Discovery of FOXP2, the first gene shown to have language-specific actions, 2001. Microsoft include free text-to-speech and speech recognition applications for the first time in Windows Vista, 2006.
2010s	Development of real-time MRI that can be used to image the articulators during speech, 2010.

The relationship between Phonetics and Phonology

History shows that the study of Phonology diverged from the study of Phonetics in the 1930s through the influence of the structuralists in the Prague School (see above), and despite any number of attempts to reconcile the two, the distinction is still maintained today. John Ohala's account of the history and consequences of the division is worth reading (see Readings).

Broadly speaking Phonetics is about the processes of speaking and listening, while Phonology is about the patterns (paradigmatic and syntagmatic) of the pronunciation elements within and across languages (and analysed both synchronically and diachronically). Different authorities have different opinions about the relationship between the two. We might characterise the extreme positions into:

• Extreme phonologist: "While phonology uses knowledge of the phonetics of languages, the patterning of pronunciation elements is a characteristic of language rather than a characteristic of the physical and physiological limitations of speaking. Thus the set of pronunciation contrasts used to differentiate utterances, or the limitations on syllable structure, or the morpho-phonology of word forms - are consequences of the way language works rather than the way the vocal apparatus works."
• Extreme phonetician: "All phonological patterns and processes have their root in the phonetic characteristics of speech communication, whether in production, perception or cognition. Differences in the phonological patterns we observe across languages must have arisen diachronically, as once phonetically-motivated patterns are absorbed in to the phonology of the language."

Ohala makes the point that if we are interested in the really big questions about speech, then the division between phonetics and phonology is not very helpful. If we want answers to questions such as "How did language evolve?", "Why are humans the only primates with language?", or "What are the neural representations and processes of language in the brain?" then it is only a scientific study of the physical character of linguistic communication that will allow us to discover and evaluate potential explanations. The goal of this scientific endeavour might be to show how the patterning of spoken language studied in phonology will be seen to have arisen from the neural capacities of the human brain and the physical form of the human body in combination with an exposure to human culture. We may then obtain a scientific, empirical account of Phonology.

Readings

Essential

• Ohala, J. J. 2004. Phonetics and phonology then, and then, and now. In H. Quene & V. van Heuven (eds.), On speech and language: Studies for Sieb G. Nooteboom. LOT Occasional Series 2. 133-140. A readable history of Phonetics alongside a discussion of the different goals of Phonetics and Phonology.
• M. K. C. Macmahon (1986). The International Phonetic Association: The first 100 years. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 16, pp 30-38. An interesting account of the early years of the International Phonetic Association that describes how the goals of Phonetics changed as it developed.

Background

• Ohala, J. J. (2010) The Relation between Phonetics and Phonology, in The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences, Second Edition (eds W. J. Hardcastle, J. Laver and F. E. Gibbon), Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford, UK. [available in library]. This is an expanded version of the Ohala paper listed above.
• Michael Ashby, Andrew Faulkner and Adrian Fourcin, "Research department of speech, hearing and phonetic sciences, UCL", The Phonetician 105-106, 2012. A brief sketch of the history and activities of my department.

Laboratory Activities

This lab will be a refresher on the use of the IPA alphabet. It will be set up a set of three interactive quizzes that use the lab computers. Working in pairs, you will be challenged to identify symbols, sounds and Voice-Place-Manner labels as fast as you can in competition with the rest of the class. There may be prizes.

The quizzes are:

1. Identify the Place and Manner of a consonant, or the Frontness/Openness of a vowel from the symbol or an audio sample.
2. Identify the IPA Symbol for a consonant from a Voice-Place-Manner label, or for a vowel from a Rounding-Frontness-Openness label or from an audio sample.
3. Identify the IPA Symbol for a consonant or vowel from just an audio sample.

Language of the Week

This week's language is English, as spoken by an American speaker from Southern Michigan. [ Source material ].

Reflections

You can improve your learning by reflecting on your understanding. Come to the tutorial prepared to discuss the items below.

1. Find 3 phonetic differences between the accent of the American English speaker above and Standard Southern British English (SSBE).
2. What is communicated through the speech chain?
3. How might the fact that the listener can see the speaker help communication?
4. How might the fact that the listener can hear himself/herself help communication?
5. What is the difference between a narrow and a broad transcription? Why are both useful?
6. What makes Phonetics an experimental science?
7. Could Phonology be an experimental science?
8. Do you consider speech technology to be an application of Phonetics and Phonology?
9. What other applications of Phonetics can you think of?

Last modified: 17:50 04-Oct-2013.