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Phonetics
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<p>Phonetics is a branch of <a href="/facts/Linguistics/oQuamvf2">linguistics</a> that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of <a href="/facts/Sign_language/Wjfl9Db6">sign languages</a>, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines: <a href="/facts/Articulatory_phonetics/1xRpMYyt">articulatory phonetics</a>, <a href="/facts/Acoustic_phonetics/vr8ljYIe">acoustic phonetics</a>, and <a href="/facts/Auditory_phonetics/ej9p582E">auditory phonetics</a>. Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the <a href="/facts/Phone_(phonetics)/SDJtYApq">phone</a>—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of <a href="/facts/Phoneme/EXGHlJ7a">phoneme</a>; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones and it is also defined as the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language. </p><p>Phonetics deals with two aspects of human speech: production (the ways humans make sounds) and perception (the way speech is understood). The <a href="/facts/Communicative_modality/ElUhqR79">communicative modality</a> of a language describes the method by which a language produces and perceives languages. Languages with oral-aural modalities such as English produce speech orally and perceive speech aurally (using the ears). Sign languages, such as <a href="/facts/Australian_Sign_Language/Yhszre3j">Australian Sign Language</a> (Auslan) and <a href="/facts/American_Sign_Language/MGTCXaGb">American Sign Language</a> (ASL), have a manual-visual modality, producing speech manually (using the hands) and perceiving speech visually. ASL and some other sign languages have in addition a manual-manual dialect for use in <a href="/facts/Tactile_signing/53vwFsWj">tactile signing</a> by <a href="/facts/Deafblind/cnPFxjcn">deafblind</a> speakers where signs are produced with the hands and perceived with the hands as well. </p>