ABSTRACT
Auditory phonetics is that branch of phonetics concerned with the perception of speech sounds, i.e. with how they are heard. It thus entails the study of the relationships between speech stimuli and a listener’s responses to such stimuli as mediated by mechanisms of the peripheral and central auditory systems, including certain cortical areas of the brain (see LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY AND NEUROLINGUISTICS). It is distinct from articulatory phonetics which involves the study of the ways in which speech sounds are produced by the vocal organs (see ARTICULATORY PHONETICS), and from acoustic phonetics which involves the analysis of the speech signal primarily by means of instrumentation (see ACOUSTIC PHONETICS). In fact, however, issues in auditory phonetics are often explored with reference to articulatory and acoustic phonetics. Indeed, there may be no clear distinction made by some speech-perception researchers between aspects of acoustic and auditory phonetics due to the fact that the two fields are so closely related.
