ABSTRACT
The medium through which most of us experience language most of the time is sound; for all non-deaf language users, the first exposure to language is through sound, and in non-literate, hearing societies it is typically the only medium. Humans have a variety of ways of producing sounds, not all of which are relevant to language (for example: coughing, burping, etc.). How sound is used in language, that is, speech sounds, is the focus of this book, and one obvious place to start out is to look at the physical processes involved in the production of speech sounds by speakers – the study of articulatory phonetics.
