5Speech is the most effective medium humans use to exchange and transmit knowledge, ideas and experiences. It exists physiologically as neural and muscular activity, and subsequent articulatory, acoustic and auditory events, and as an abstract, rule-governed system at the psychological level. Together, both levels produce communication by speech. To appreciate speech and its communicative function, all of its characteristics must be understood. This book offers the most comprehensive and accessible coverage of the three areas of phonetics: articulatory, acoustic, and auditory or speech perception. Students without a linguistics background can be daunted by phonetics, so clear language is used to define linguistics and phonetics concepts with examples and illustrations to ensure understanding. Furthermore, each chapter concludes with comprehension exercises to reinforce understanding. Online exercises and recordings of speech stimuli from various languages provide additional opportunity to hone perception, production, phonetic transcription skills and acoustic analysis measurement practice.