Every person's life is filled with different sounds. These are the noises of the street, household appliances, musical and speech sounds. The meaning of the word "sound" will be interpreted from the standpoint of acoustics. Let's start with the simplest. First of all, sound is a physical phenomenon (it propagates in waves in a gaseous, liquid and solid medium), perceived by the human ear. Melody and harmony are built from musical sounds, and speech sounds are the simplest element of the language with characteristic properties.
Variety of sounds
It is conditionally possible to divide them into speech, music and noise (they have a lot of subgroups and gradations). The most common are the sounds of the third group, which surround a person in everyday life (conditionally, one can distinguish the sounds of a city street, home environment, surrounding animate and inanimate nature). Generally speaking, sound is what is perceived by the ear (although some of the sounds cannot be heard due to the structure of the hearing aid).
Parameters
The main characteristics and influence of all sounds on a person is studied by such a branch of physics as acoustics.
Since sound is the result of vibrations of elastic bodies, there are parameters for its measurement.
Frequency andspeed of sound
The human hearing aid is tuned to perceive a certain range of vibrations (16-20000 Hz). For example, the well-known tuning fork (usually produced in the form of a plug) is tuned to 440 Hz (Hertz), which corresponds to the vibrational frequency of a certain musical sound - this is the “la” of the first octave.
1 Hz is one oscillation per second. All sounds outside the audible range are indistinguishable by humans. If this range is (conditionally) from 0 to 15 Hz, then it is called infrasound. All vibrations above 20,000 are called ultrasonic.
As a physical phenomenon, sound has such a characteristic as speed, which, obeying the basic laws, depends on the nature of the propagation medium (more precisely, on its characteristics: temperature, density, pressure, state, etc.).
Wave amplitude
If the height of a sound phenomenon (high-low) depends on the number of hertz, then its loudness depends on the amplitude of the oscillations. The change in amplitude is expressed in decibels. A decibel is a relative value indicating a change in the amplitude of the vibration in the direction of increasing or decreasing (louder or quieter).
Characteristics of speech sounds
Sound is the smallest component of a speech stream. Like music, speech is recorded using certain signs - letters. But if in music the sound has four main characteristics (height, length, timbre and loudness), then speech is divided into vowels and consonants.
speech, which is a graphic representation of oral speech. The difference between vowels and consonants lies in their formation (or pronunciation). The first are formed with the help of voice and when pronouncing the air stream does not encounter obstacles in its path. But the latter are formed with the help of voice and noise (resistance of obstacles to air flow) or only noise. Based on the characteristics and place of sounds in words, their classification is made.
Vowels
The names in the classification of vowels indicate the participation in the formation of sounds of certain organs of the speech apparatus and their position during pronunciation.
Thus, labialized sounds differ from non-labialized ones by participation in their formation of lips (from lat. labium - lip). But the position of the tongue is taken into account in several ways.
The first is the position of the tongue relative to the vertical: upper, middle and lower lifts. Accordingly, the tongue is at the top, middle and bottom. There are also front, rear and middle rows. In the first case, the key role in sound formation is assigned to the tip of the tongue, in the second - to the root of the tongue (rises to the soft palate), in the third - to the back of the tongue.
It is worth noting that there are 10 vowels in Russian, and only 6 sounds. Such a mismatch occurs due to iotized letters, which denote not one, but two sounds at once (E, Yo, Yu, Ya).
Consonants
This is 34 sounds and 23 letters (2 of them do not indicate sounds), which are divided by hardness and softness, sonority and deafness.
Lack of consonant sounds in wordsturns the speech stream into nonsense. But with a lack of vowels, the text (at the very least) can be read, albeit with great difficulty.
Classification of consonants follows the same principle as vowels.
Research from an English university
With the help of letters, oral speech is encoded into written language. These are two types of activity, closely related to each other, but having their own laws. This clearly shows the test in the form of text with incorrect lettering.
Many elementary school children are not able to read this text to the end and understand the meaning, because the process of reading itself is not automated enough for them. But adults often notice the rearrangement of letters only at the end of the text. This ability appears after the rules of the Russian language begin to be applied "automatically" and do not cause difficulties.
