Representing the sounds of speech Summary

We have looked at two forms of representation of speech: transcription and acoustic representations. We have seen that each has a place, and each type of representation has both advantages and drawbacks.

We will use verbal descriptions, transcriptions and acoustic representations to try to give some impression of the way the sounds of English are produced, and to try to show some of the details of those sounds where using words is not straightforward. Phonetics is special in linguistics for the way it combines the production and perception of sounds, the auditory, visual and kinesthetic aspects of the subject: this means that learning phonetics can be a multi-sensory experience. It is worth persisting, if frustration sets in, to try to put the various forms of phonetic description and representation together, because it results in a richer understanding of the embodied nature of human speech.