III. The definition of phonetics

Phonetics is termed as the study of speech sounds.

There are three sub-branches of phonetics

(1) Articulatory phonetics – the production of speech sounds

(2) Acoustic phonetics – the physical properties of speech sounds

(3) Auditory phonetics – the perceptive mechanism of speech sounds. It is the primary concern in linguistics.

教师解析：

When we talk, our brain sends signals to the vocal organs to produce sequences of speech sounds. These sounds strike the eardrums of the listeners. The listener’s brain reconstructs the massages. The whole process is a chain of events: production of speech of sounds speech sounds traveling in the air perception of speech sounds. The study of the first step is the task of articulatory phonetics, and then second step acoustic phonetics and the last step auditory phonetics.