Auditory discrimination

      Auditory discrimination is concerned with looking at and listening to speech sounds in terms of how they are produced (articulated) in the vocal tract including sounds and sound patterns associated with the systematic patterning of a particular word articulation or pronunciation. For example, how can we describe the different pronunciation of cat and cats? A hissing s-sound is noted for cats. This hissing sound is produced by air flowing from the lungs and passing through a narrow passage between the tongue tip and the roof of the
mouth. For the purpose and intention of this topic, we will first focus our attention on the main elements of articulatory sounds, such as consonants, vowels, diphthongs, homophones and homonyms. The thrust of this topic will be on listening to correct articulation in preparation for correct speech production later.


       Phonetics is the study of sounds made by humans when they talk. A change of sound in a word can change the meaning of the word. For example, the word Mat is made up of three main sounds i.e. m + a + t = mat. If we change the first  sound to b, than we have b + a + t = bat, which refers to another thing. Any sound that changes the meaning of a word is called a phoneme.