Which field studies the sounds of speech and how they are produced?

• A. Semantics
• B. Phonology
• C. Phonetics
• D. Morphology

Answer: (C)

Sounds of speech and how they are produced are studied in phonetics. This field focuses on the physical aspects of speech: how the articulators—like the tongue, lips, and vocal cords—shape air to create consonants and vowels, how those sounds travel as acoustic waves, and how listeners perceive them. Within phonetics you have areas such as articulatory phonetics (the movements and positions of the speech organs) and acoustic phonetics (the properties of the sound waves themselves).

Phonology, by contrast, looks at the abstract system of sounds in a language—the distribution of phonemes and the rules that govern sound patterns—without detailing how the sounds are physically produced. Semantics deals with meaning, and morphology concerns the structure of words and how they are formed. So the study of how sounds are produced and their physical properties is phonetics.