Subject: Speech Processing

Topic: Speech Production, Acoustic Phonetics and Auditory Perception

Difficulty: Low

(i) Auditory phonetics is related to the perception and interpretation of sounds. The transmitter and receiver are involved in the process of linguistic communication. In case of auditory phonetics, the receiver is the listener, that is the human ear.

(ii) The sound is heard by human listener and then is transmitted to the brain. The ear perceives the auditory stimuli, analyses the stimuli and transmits them to the brain.

(iii) The outer ear consits of the auricle or the pinna and the auditory meatus or the outer ear canal.

(iv) Outer ear has two functions:

(a) Protects the middle ear. (b) Resonator for the sound waves entering our ear.

(v) The details of the listener mechanism is shown in the figure below: