Phonetics and Phonology

According to Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL International) [20], the linguistic hierarchy from one of the leaves to the top is as follows, Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics. In Chapter 2, we reviewed the anatomy of the human speech production and perception. In this chapter we will start by exploring the range and limitations imposed by the speech production system, so called phonetics. Then, we will follow to a higher level in the hierarchy by studying how sounds are organized and used in human languages, so called Phonology, along with the rest of the hierarchy which we will call linguistics as a whole. In the last part of this chapter, we will pay specific attention to suprasegmental1 flow of human speech called prosody. This is to give the reader a basic understanding of the types of sounds produced by the vocal tract. Of course, as with many of the other topics covered in this book, we will only scratch the surface and will concentrate on portions of the discipline that are more directly relevant to the speaker recognition task.