Auditory Phonetics

Auditory phonetics is the study of how we perceive and interpret the sounds of speech through our ears and brain. It examines how sound waves produced by speech are received by the ear, transformed into neural signals, and processed to identify speech sounds like vowels and consonants. This branch helps us understand the mechanisms behind speech perception, including how context and auditory features influence our understanding of spoken language. Essentially, auditory phonetics bridges the physical properties of speech sounds with our neurological and perceptual experiences of hearing them.