I．Brainstorming

How does human communication take place?

II. Two kinds of forms of human communication

There are two kinds of forms of human communication—linguistic communication and/or paralinguistic communication. The latter is by means of gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, graphs, etc. The former takes place in the form of spoken language or written language or both. The medium of spoken language is speech sound.

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.

IV. Conclusion

The study of speech sound is called Phonetics with three sub-branches—articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics and auditory phonetics