articulatoria

Articulatoria, or articulatory phonetics, is the branch of linguistics that studies how speech sounds are produced by the human vocal tract. It describes the configurations and movements of the vocal tract’s articulators—lips, tongue, teeth, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum, and glottis—plus the jaw and nasal passages that shape sound. Sounds are analyzed in terms of place of articulation (where the sound is formed: bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, postalveolar, palatal, velar, glottal), manner of articulation (how the airflow is constricted: plosive, fricative, nasal, trill, tap, approximant, lateral), and voicing (voiced or voiceless). Vowels are described by tongue height and backness and by lip rounding; consonants by the combination of place, manner, and voicing. The field also considers supralaryngeal configuration—how the oral and nasal cavities are shaped and resonated to produce distinct sounds.

Articulatory studies employ imaging and measurement techniques such as electromagnetic articulography (EMA), ultrasound, MRI, palatography, electropalatography, and X-ray-based methods. These tools capture real-time articulator positions and movements, informing both theoretical models and practical applications.

Applications include improvements in speech synthesis and recognition, language documentation and teaching, clinical linguistics and speech therapy, and the analysis of phonological systems. The field intersects with phonology, acoustic phonetics, linguistics, and speech sciences, contributing to cross-linguistic descriptions and to understanding how production constraints influence sound inventories and phonotactics.