Speech 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 expression 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 activities and recordings of speech stimuli from various languages provide additional opportunity to hone perception, production, phonetic transcription skills and acoustic analysis measurement practice.