The sounds produced by human vocal organs can be studied in many different ways. The study of sounds is calld phonetics. Phonetics is mainly concerned with describing the speech sounds that occur in the languages of the world. Specifically, we want to know what people are doing when they are talking and when they are listening to speech.
Some phoneticians are interested in studying the physical and acoustic aspects of speech sounds, while others are interested in studying the patterns and functions of sounds that occur in a language. In the latter type of study, it is important to realize that speech sounds can be perceived and represented as a sequence of discrete units, even though they are physically continuous. Native speakers of any language can intuitively extract the linguistically significant units. For example, when native speakers of English are asked how many sounds there are in the word pit they will most probably ansewer three. The concept oe decreteness is a basic assumption in the study of speech sounds.
