The articulatory aspect comprises all the movements and positions of the speech organs necessary to pronounce a speech sound. They are inseparable in the real process of communication, but each of them can be singled out in order to characterize different aspects of sound phenomena. The analysis of the process of human speech makes it possible to define four levels of speech production: articulatory, acoustic, auditory and functional. It contains the following stages:ġ) the formation of the message in the brain of a speaker Ģ) the transmission of the message along the nervous system to the speech organs ģ) the production of particular speech sounds by speech organs Ĥ) the transmission of speech sounds in sound waves travelling through the air ĥ) the perception of speech sounds by the listener's ear Ħ) the transmission of the message along the nervous system to the listener's brain ħ) the interpretation of the message in the brain of a listener.Ĭommunication is possible only because the speaker and the listener interpret the sounds as units of the same language. Human speech is a complex process controlled by the brain. The importance of the sound matter of language is difficult to overestimate: to speak any language a person must know nearly all 100% of its phonetics, while only 50-90% of its grammar and 1% of its vocabulary may be sufficient. Segmental and suprasegmental units serve to form and differentiate units of other subsystems of language – lexical and grammatical. Segmental units are elementary sounds – vowels and consonants suprasegmental units are syllables, word-stress, and intonation. In fact it contains two systems – segmental and suprasegmental, each of which is a specially organized language system with a certain number of units. The sound system of a languageis a set of units arranged in an orderly way to replace each other in a given framework. The sound substance gives shape to a spoken message in communication it forms units of the phonetic system of a concrete language. In oral speech it is the sound substance, in written speech it is the graphic substance.Ī substance is not in itself language, but it is what forms patterns of language.

It is a process of communication by means of language.īoth the oral and written speech forms have a material substance.

Language as “the immediate actuality of thought” exists in two speech forms: oral and written. Phonetics and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL)

The subject matter of phonetics, its branches and methods of investigationĥ.

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