Phonetics is the branch of linguistics that studies human speech communication and how sounds are used in the spoken language. Phonetics is usually divided into three main areas of research: Articulatory Phonetics, Acoustic Phonetics, and Perceptual Phonetics. Phonetics is a multi-disciplinary field of scientific research, integrating knowledge from traditional human sciences like general linguistics, language development, dialectology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, with anatomy, physiology, physical acoustics, developmental psychology, robotics and information processing. Phonetic studies also include speech recognition, the analysis and transcription of speech and the use of phonetics for forensic purposes.
