​Back in 2015, I noted what I thought was an interesting difference between the English and French versions of an advert for a car windscreen replacement service. Here it is:
 
“Since this is the silly season, I will finish with a trivial cross-language observation I have made in France and the UK. There is a company that repairs car windscreens, called Autoglass in the UK and (I don’t know why) Carglass in France. They advertise on TV in both countries, and have a jingle that goes “Autoglass repair, Autoglass replace” in UK and “Carglass répare, Carglass remplace” in France. The English version is sung in 4/4 time, but in French this timing would make it necessary to give two beats to the vowel of “Car”. Since the vowel in “Car” isn’t long in French (which doesn’t distinguish long and short vowels) this wouldn’t be appropriate, so the French version is in 3/4 (Waltz) time, though otherwise identical. I think that is very sensitive of Autoglass/Carglass.”

I have just seen a joke on a French website which (for me) adds a postscript:

Roughly translated, it asks “Why should you eat some ice cream after an unhappy love affair?”.
Answer: “Because ice cream repairs, because ice cream replaces”

I recently had a look at the Wikipedia article on Estuary English, having ignored it for a long time. It’s a topic I keep away from, mainly because so many people pontificate on it, whether they know anything about phonetics or not.  There are quite  a lot of things that seem to me to need changing.

The lead section (the opening paragraph) contains a “definition” of EE by John Wells. The quote comes from a web document called www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/ee-faqs-jcw.htm While the statement that EE is "Standard English spoken with the accent of the southeast of England" might serve as a rough pointer to what is being talked about, it does not seem to me to be what you could call a definition. 

[Note:  I have now rewritten most of the "Features" section of the article referred to below, so most of my criticisms of that section no longer apply]

The main part of the EE article is called “Features”, and is one of those “laundry list” bits of writing that you get when lots of different people add in their three-pennyworth. Some claims are dubious, some almost certainly wrong, and far too many are based on a single source (Joanna Przedlacka’s 2001 study, worthy though that is).

---------
[I have now removed the material referred to below]
I will quote one case that strikes me as egregious. The “Features” section quotes Ken Lodge’s 2009 book A Critical Introduction to Phonetics as stating that “Estuary /əʊ/ may be pronounced [ɑːɪ̯̈] or [ɑːʏ̯̈], with the first element somewhat lengthened and much more open than in RP and the second element being near-close central, with or without lip rounding.” In addition, a vowel diagram purporting to be from Lodge’s book (p. 175) is reproduced showing the direction of travel for this diphthong. This doesn’t correspond to the diagram in the Lodge reference, and I wonder if the quotation is from somewhere else. To begin with, Lodge is not talking about (and doesn’t mention) Estuary English - he is, rather, talking about possible Australian influence on British English vowels. In his 2009 book, he says that the alternative vowel glide corresponding to RP  /əʊ/ is [ɑəᵻ] or [ɑəʏ]; the diagram shows the former.
----------
​
I won’t go into all the faults with the Features here. Some statements I find hard to believe, such as the claim that some Essex speakers have a clear [l] in ‘pull’. There is surprisingly little about glottalization of /p,t,k,tʃ/ and glottal replacement of /t/. To me the presence of intervocalic glottal stop for /t/ (e.g. ‘getting better’ as [ɡeʔɪŋ beʔə]) is one of the most salient characteristics of this accent, yet this article only mentions replacement of /t/ when it occurs pre-pausally and post-consonantally (the one example given is ‘can’t’ [kɑ:nʔ]).

The “Features” section contains two recorded examples, one of Ricky Gervais and one of Russell Brand. While these are good clear recordings, there is nothing in the text to indicate who has judged these two to be speakers of EE. Compare the article on RP, where the list of RP speakers has a citation to back up each claim.
​
To end the article, someone has added a section called Traditional Rural Estuary English which is about old Kentish and Essex accents. Looking at the history of recent edits this used to be very much longer but most of it has been moved to another article. What is left seems to me to shed little or no light on the present-day nature of EE and I think the article would be better if it was removed.

We seem to have a bit of trouble with the pronunciation of ‘omicron’, which is currently on everyone’s lips. Leaving aside the many times recently that I have heard this pronounced as ‘omnicron’, how are English speakers pronouncing this word? The most popular broadcast pronunciation seems to be /’ɒmɪkrɒn/, with some saying /’əʊmɪkrɒn/. I have only heard /əʊˈmaɪkrɒn/ used once, by Mariella Frostrup on Times Radio. I’ve been trying some introspection into what my own pronunciation is. I studied Classics for many years, but I have to confess that I was always weak on the Greek alphabet, and as well as struggling to remember the correct alphabetical order I never knew whether to use the anglicized pronunciation or attempt a possible Ancient Greek pronunciation of a letter; as far as I remember, I say /’əʊmɪkrɒn/, but without much conviction. I do remember that ‘omicron’ is “little o” and ‘omega’ is “big o”. I still have my Liddell and Scott lexicon, which shows that the Greek version of omicron is ờ μικρόν.
One naturally turns to pronunciation dictionaries. LPD’s preference is for /əʊˈmaɪkrɒn/   with alternatives / əʊˈmaɪkrən / or /’ɒmɪkrɒn/. CEPD has the same; this is surprising given what I think is my personal pronunciation preference, but when revising the EPD for new editions we tended to assume that for erudite terms Daniel Jones would have taken trouble to get it right, and we would therefore have stuck with the penultimate-stressed version unless we suspected that a change had taken place. Jones has /əʊˈmaɪkrən/ in all editions of EPD. Clive Upton’s Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation gives the penultimate-stress pronunciation (with many alternatives)  and Geoff Lindsey’s CUBE has /əwmɑ́jkrən/
Where else can one turn for advice on the pronunciation of this word? Well, Wikipedia. WP doesn’t feel the need to give an IPA transcription for every word, and if one is provided it is usually a single recommendation. In the case of omicron, however, we get three possible pronunciations /ˈoʊmɪkrɒn, ˈɒmɪkrɒn, oʊˈmaɪkrɒn/, which is pretty generous. The transcriptions are attributed to the OED, though my copy of OED is older and has /ˈɒmɪkrɒn, əʊˈmaɪkrɒn/.
One or two newspapers have started shortening the name of the virus to “omi”, and this seems to me most likely to be pronounced /əʊmi/. But at present the national preference seems to be for /’ɒmɪkrɒn/.
 
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The “centring diphthongs” of the English RP/BBC accent are in continuous change. When I first studied English phonetics in the 1960’s there were textbooks which listed /ɪə/, /eə/, /ʊə/ and /ɔə/. It was made clear to me that the last of these, /ɔə/ was going the way of the dinosaurs, and indeed Daniel Jones remarks, in my edition of Outline of English Phonetics (Ninth Edition) “many speakers of Received English (myself among them) do not use the diphthong ɔə at all, but replace it always by ɔː”. This diphthong used to be very familiar to me, as I used to hear it in the speech of my older Lancashire (Merseyside) relatives born in the 19th Century. The diphthong /ʊə/ started its move towards the exit door rather later. Already by the time CUP took over publication of the English Pronouncing Dictionary, then on its Fourteenth Edition, the recommendation for words such as ‘your’, ‘poor’, ‘insure’ had /ɔː/, though /ʊə/ was always given as second choice.
This leaves us with /ɪə/ and /eə/. As many are aware, /eə/ is the next to go. Many recent writers have observed that the vowel element in SQUARE is more often a long pure vowel /ɛː/ than the traditional diphthong /eə/. Clive Upton’s Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation dropped /eə/ completely in favour of /ɛː/, and later Alan Cruttenden’s Gimson’s Pronunciation of English (Eighth Edition) went the same way. Geoff Lindsey’s English After RP also uses /ɛː/. Until recently, however, Wikipedia’s articles on RP and on English Phonology stuck with /eə/ Recently someone changed the RP article so that the SQUARE vowel was described as a long mid front vowel, but was still symbolized as /eə/. This resulted in a very confusing description, so I have edited the article so that /ɛː/ (SQUARE) takes its place among the long pure vowels. I have also noted that /eə/ does not now belong in the list of diphthong phonemes. This is really just bringing WP’s practice into line with its statement that “The centring diphthongs are gradually being eliminated in RP”.
Now we have just /ɪə/. But Wikipedia says that “The remaining centring glide /ɪə/ is increasingly pronounced as a monophthong [ɪː]”. A reference to something written by me was cited in support of this statement, but I can find no trace of this statement in that article so I have removed the reference (I probably wrote something of the sort elsewhere, but I can’t remember where). However, Cruttenden (2014), p.154 gives a more solid support: “Increasingly, pronunciations with a monophthong [ɪː] can be heard within GB”.
I don’t believe the change from /ɪə/ to /ɪː/ has yet been completed, though I don’t doubt that the change is going on. In my own speech I believe I still have a diphthong in open syllables like ‘fear’, ‘near’, but I do have a pure vowel before /r/ as in ‘fearing’, ‘nearer’.
Watch this space! I will now have to go through other Wikipedia articles on English phonemes to bring them into line with what has been done for the RP article with respect to /eə ~ ɛ:/.

In trying to help improve Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics, I occasionally write an article on phoneticians who have had a significant impact on the subject. There are many such people who do not yet have a Wikipedia article to their name (suggestions are welcome). Since this blog recently discussed Articulatory Settings (or Basis of Articulation, to use the alternative name that Wikipedia has chosen), I thought that Beatrice Honikman ought to have an article. I submitted a little one some time ago, and it has now been accepted. You can see it here. 
​Incidentally, she had retired from the Department of Phonetics by the time I moved to the University of Leeds, so we were never colleagues. As far as I remember I only met her once, at a conference in Leeds, but her former colleagues spoke well of her. 

I recently did a bit of work on Wikipedia's coverage of English phonology, so here's a short summary of what I have done, in case anyone is interested.
Looking at the English Phonology article, I felt that there wasn't any comprehensive coverage of the issue of whether the velar nasal consonant [ŋ] should be treated as a phoneme of English, or as an allophone of /n/. This may well seem a very minor old matter, but I think it's an interesting one. I also feel it's a nice simple example of what you can achieve with underlying phonological representations and ordered rules. I was going to add this piece to the Consonants section, but it was much bigger than any of the other notes on English consonants, and one Wikipedia editor suggested I should start a new section in English Phonology on Controversial Issues. So I did.

Having created a section on Controversial Issues, I felt it looked rather empty with only the velar nasal case to list. Looking around for other issues brought me to look again at the analysis of the English vowel system. I never cease to be surprised when I read that English has 20 or 21 vowel phonemes, especially when this statement is linked with a remark to the effect that this huge number of vowel phonemes makes English a very unusual language. I don't have a problem with saying that English (RP, at least) has a large number of vocalic nuclei, but that's not the same as saying it has a large number of vowel phonemes. So I have added a second section to Controversial Issues on alternative analyses of the English vowel system with fewer phonemes. Other editors have subsequently made improvements to what I wrote, and this has made the explanations clearer.

Finally, I realized that I had duplicated some material that I wrote for a different Wikipedia article, on the Phoneme.  The piece in question is headed The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions. I wanted to make the point that there are different ways of analyzing the phonemic system of a language. Since I had used the English vowel system and the velar nasal as examples, I decided to reduce the overlap with the newer material by slimming down the examples.
 
Any comments would be welcome.

[NOTE: THE ARTICLE ON 'RELAXED PRONUNCIATION' HAS NOW BEEN REMOVED]

​It is a well-known fact that when we speak naturally we fail to pronounce all the phonemes and syllables that would be predicted if we said each separate word slowly and carefully. I have been reading Wikipedia’s articles on Elision and related topics, and I’ve been getting confused. This is an area that has always seemed vague and ill-defined, and Wikipedia has a lot of articles that overlap each other and don’t seem coordinated. In particular,  I have problems with an unusual article called Relaxed pronunciation. The title bothers me: I have never come across the term in any work on phonetics or pronunciation teaching, and I suspect that the person who wrote the article just made it up. Wikipedia articles are supposed to be on recognized topics, and to contains references to published literature, but this article has none. Lots of writers use terms like ‘casual speech’  (e.g. Linda Shockey in Sound Patterns of Spoken English) or ‘spontaneous speech’ (e.g. Richard Cauldwell’s Phonology for Listening); we talk about “connected speech phenomena”. These aspects of speech are tremendously important and need careful analysis and discussion.

If you look at the “Relaxed speech” article, you will see that it begins with a list of American English casual-speech forms of some common words and phrases, with the normal orthography, an IPA transcription of the reduced form and a respelling to indicate the pronunciation. Some are straightforward, such as
     kind of: [ˈkaɪɾ̃ə], kinda
     don't you: [ˈdoʊntʃə], doncha

while others strike me as odd:
     fixing to: "finna"
     I'm going to: [ˈaɪmə], "I'mma" or [ˈɑmənə], "Ah-muhnuh"

A few cases of single words are listed among the phrases:
     suppose: [spoʊz] s'pose
     library: [ˈlaɪbɹi], [ˈlaɪˌbɛɹi]

After the American English examples, the article becomes a bit of a free-for-all where other contributors have added examples of what they know about other languages. None seems to have taken the trouble to look up a handbook on the pronunciation of the language they are writing about. It all has a rather anecdotal feel.

The Dutch and German examples are given only in a respelling form. There are half a dozen Russian examples, given with IPA transcription, and something about contracted forms in Russian poetry with an example that I can’t understand. French gets very little coverage, with notes about the pronunciations of ‘te’ and ‘"Qu'est-ce que”; however, there is a more detailed analysis (with IPA) of “il ne savait peut-être plus ce qu'il faisait”. The section on Spanish is brief and not very clear: we get some notes about the verb ‘estar’, the pronunciation of ‘para’ and some discussion of the lenition of intervocalic /d/ into an approximant. Many of the assertions in this section have been challenged with the comment “citation needed”. Portuguese gets quite a lot of examples (I think these are all European Portuguese, though we are not told). Confusingly, the reduced form is often given to left of the “=” sign, for example

     home = homem (man)

As far as I know, ‘homem’ is not pronounced with a final /m/ anyway, so it’s not clear what exactly the change is. The limitations of using spelling to indicate pronunciation in detail can be seen in examples of words beginning with ‘qu’, as in

     que + o = q'o

The section on Japanese is very brief, and does not use IPA. For Turkish (no IPA) we get examples to illustrate one single instance, the contraction of ‘ne’ to ‘n’ before a vowel. We also get an example of vowel loss in poetry. For Hindustani there is a two-sentence explanation of how /h/ is elided in relaxed speech. The article ends with the observation that in Bengali

            “it is common to change the sound of rchh to chchh or chch in normal speech. For example, করছ will be pronounced কচ্ছ or কচ্চ."

- which I find pretty opaque.  
 
Here is a list of related Wikipedia topics (I am sure it is incomplete) that cover the field of elision, contraction etc. There is a wealth of knowledge in these articles, but there seems to be no route-map to help the reader to find their way.

• Elision (perhaps the best known heading in the phonetics and pronunciation literature). There is also a language-specific article on Elision (French)
• Syncope (not much used in works on phonetics and pronunciation, more familiar in works on metrics and versification, but it's a useful article)
• Stress and vowel reduction  (particularly the section on weak forms)
• Contraction (Wikipedia lists this as Contraction (Grammar), but it seems to me to be mainly about pronunciation - and to add to the confusion there is a substantial part of English auxiliaries and contractions devoted to the same topic).
• Crasis
• Sandhi
• ​Synalepha   (which contains links to a lot of other similar processes not usually found in the phonetics literature).

Incidentally, If you look for John Wells’ useful term Compression in WP you will be redirected to Syncope.

[NOTE:  I HAVE NOW ADDED SOME NOTES BASED ON THE MATERIAL BELOW TO THE RELEVANT SECTION OF THE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE ON APROXIMANTS -SEE IT HERE]


The introduction of the term approximant has been a useful one for phonetics. It has come to replace the earlier terms frictionless continuant and semivowel. It is usually credited to Peter Ladefoged, in his early work A Study of West African Languages (1964), and Abercrombie recommends adoption of the term in his 1967 book Elements of General Phonetics. The basic idea is straightforward. We can take the opening section of Wikipedia’s article on Approximant as the basis for a provisional definition:
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough, nor with enough articulatory precision, to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which normally produce no turbulence. This class is composed of sounds like [ɹ] (as in ''rest'') and semivowels like [j] and [w] (as in ''yes'' and ''west'', respectively), as well as lateral approximants like [l].

I have no problem with this as a definition of approximant. However, a much later introduction has been the concept of voiceless approximant. An example of these often quoted is the sound [ʍ] as found in the “voiceless w” in some English speakers’ pronunciation of ‘whine’ (particularly in Scottish accents). Another is the palatal sound at the beginning of the word ‘hue’. Ladefoged and Maddieson (The Sounds of the World’s Languages, 1996, p 326) give a few examples of voiceless approximants: speaking of the distinction between ‘you’ and ‘hue’ in English, they write “the onset in the second word is normally a voiceless palatal approximant, [j̊], for which the IPA has no unitary symbol.”. Later, they write “In … Scotland, the words ‘weather’ and ‘whether’ contrast, the latter beginning with a non-fricative [ʍ]”. From the data they report, it seems extremely unlikely that any language has a phonemic contrast between a voiceless approximant and a voiceless fricative.

The problem with voiceless approximants now confronts us. We know from the definition of approximant that if an articulation is made with a narrow enough air passage to produce turbulent airflow, and hence to generate fricative noise, then it cannot be an approximant. If the airflow and articulation of an approximant have to be such that turbulence is not generated, how can a voiceless approximant be audible? If a voiceless approximant is audible, how can it be non-fricative? This dilemma is presented in a very useful discussion piece arising from disagreement among Wikipedia contributors at phonology - Do voiceless approximants exist? What is the consensus among phoneticians/phonologists? - Linguistics Stack Exchange

It seems that the only way out of this dilemma is to argue that there are two ways of generating an audible voiceless continuant sound, one being the familiar type of most fricatives, where the noise resulting from turbulent flow is produced at the point of articulation, and the other being noise produced by non-turbulent airflow and generated in the vocal tract, though not at a specific point of articulation. A detailed explanation by Shadle (“The aerodynamics of speech” in Hardcastle and Laver (eds) The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences,1997, p.37) describes the difference between turbulent and laminal flow (interestingly, though she produced valuable work on speech aerodynamics she was an engineer who had previously been working on jet engines). If we go back to the pioneering work of Kenneth Pike, in his ‘Phonetics’ (1943) we find a distinction proposed between ‘local’ friction and ‘cavity’ friction. Pike’s cavity friction presumably depends on laminar flow. On p. 71, he writes “One of the marked weaknesses in current usage of friction as a criterion for consonant vowel differentiation lies in the failure to distinguish satisfactorily between two types of friction which function very differently and have different origins, even though the border lines are not sharp between them. Generally speaking, one type retains its audibility when voiced (e.g. for sibilants) the other is a weak fricative and audible only when sounds are voiceless (e.g. most vowels and certain sonants). The first type results from stricture at a single local point; the second is due to cavity friction, that is, voiceless resonance of a chamber has a whole caused by air going through it as through an open tube.”

It does seem, then, that there is at least a theoretical possibility of a viable phonetic distinction between voiceless fricatives and voiceless approximants.

In another theoretical discussion, Catford (Fundamental Problems in Phonetics, 1977, pp. 120-124) suggests a three-way distinction between fricative, approximant and resonant.  “In fricative articulation the articulatory channel is very small and the flow through it is always turbulent.” Of approximants he writes “they have non-turbulent flow when voiced; but the flow becomes turbulent when they are made voiceless”. Of resonant, he writes “In voiceless resonants … there must always be turbulent flow through the glottis; if there were not, there would simply be silence.” In the case of Catford’s resonant, therefore, the noise excitation in the vocal tract is the same as for [h], being made by turbulent flow through the glottis. A similar position is found in Laver’s Principles of Phonetics (p. 269): “All resonants have a stricture of open approximation. A necessary condition for the performance of resonant is that the airstream passes through the vocal tract in a smoothly laminar flow, with no audible local frication.” The idea of voiceless resonant is necessary for understanding how voiceless vowels are audible.
​
I haven’t said anything about the acoustic characteristics of voiceless approximants, mainly because I have not yet had time to analyze a controlled set of recordings of comparative fricatives and voiced approximants. What I expect to find in spectrograms (and have found in a few trials) is that in a voiceless approximant made without local friction as far as I can manage, the formants corresponding to those of the voiced equivalent are visible in the noise spectrum generated by laminar flow. In the case of voiceless continuants with local friction, what is most visible is regions of high-frequency energy similar to those of other voiceless fricatives.
Now we need to look at how the concept of voiceless approximants works in practice rather than in theory. Pike’s work was aimed at establishing a pure theory of phonetics removed from the influence of phonology and of phonemic function. But however fine the distinctions he considered between phonetically different articulations, distinctions were only of interest if they were above the threshold of perception (Pike, p. 151). This is a relevant condition in the present issue.
 
To keep things simple, we can confine the discussion to the voiceless [j] and [w] sounds of English, (which I will call ‘hue’ and ‘whine’), and leave aside sounds such as [h] and [ɬ]. Accounts of voiceless approximants in the context of European languages seems to be always found in discussing voiceless counterparts of (voiced) approximant phonemes: these are often (but not always) voiceless allophones of voiced approximant phonemes. Sounds classed as voiceless approximants appear to be always made with the tongue close to the roof of the mouth, though the place of constriction is of course variable. They are related to a number of other similar sounds. The relationships can be set out like this:
 
(1)   Voiceless approximants and voiceless fricatives: if the articulation produces local friction with turbulent flow, we get a palatal fricative [ç] (though some writers on English phonology prefer the symbolization [hj]) for ‘hue’. For ‘whine’ the IPA symbol is [ʍ] in the case of a voiceless fricative, but this is also used for the suggested voiceless approximant.
(2)   Voiceless approximants and devoiced fricatives: the latter can be shown with the alternative of a devoicing diacritic [ ̥  or ̊ ] appended to the symbol for a voiced fricative. Thus ‘hue’ is [j̊] and ‘whine’ is [w̥].
(3)   Voiceless approximants and voiceless fricatives: a lesser degree of articulatory constriction can be shown by means of an “open” diacritic [ ̨ ], which could be taken to imply absence of local friction. Thus [x̨], [ʍ̨].
(4)   Voiceless approximants and devoiced vowels: we could in theory show ‘hue’ as [i̥] and ‘whine’ as [u̥].
 
If the voiceless approximant is to be acceptable as a viable phonetic category, it must fulfil certain conditions:

1. No sound can be classed as a voiceless approximant if it contains audible local friction.
2. Phoneticians must be able to make a reliable auditory discrimination between voiceless approximants and voiceless fricatives. The auditory difference between local friction and cavity friction must be sufficient to enable the distinction to be made.
3. It must be possible for a phonetician to produce and demonstrate clearly distinct voiceless fricatives and voiceless approximants.
4. Languages must exist where voiceless approximants (as defined in (1)) occur regularly in speech.

 
Conclusion
 I do not believe that the conditions listed above are met. On the other hand, it seems clear that at least some phonetics researchers feel the need for the category voiceless approximant. I believe that the best solution is to treat the label voiceless approximant as a “cover term”, i.e. one which does not map on to a single phonetic entity, but on to a collection of related entities.  I would use a form of words like this: “The term voiceless approximant denotes a voiceless sound with an articulation similar to a voiced approximant, which may consist of cavity friction resulting from laminal airflow in the vocal tract, or local friction resulting from turbulent airflow through one or more constrictions, or both”.
 

I was very sorry to hear of the recent death of Professor Erik Fudge. He was a pleasant and good-natured colleague at Reading University, and in fact I knew him earlier in the days when he was at Hull University and I was at Leeds. I am a great admirer of his work on phonology, particularly “Syllables” in Journal of Linguistics, 5, 1969, and his well-known book  English Word Stress. This is a sad loss.

[Note: I have now rewritten the Wikipedia article described below]

Auditory phonetics

Phonetics is traditionally said to have three principal branches: Acoustic, Articulatory and Auditory.  Wikipedia has, appropriately, articles on Acoustic phonetics, Articulatory phonetics and Auditory phonetics. I have always felt that of these three, Auditory gets the least attention and may be regarded as something of a Cinderella. If you look at each of the three articles, you will probably find, as I do, some serious weaknesses, but the Auditory one is by far the most unsatisfactory. It consists largely of some sketchy definitions and some rather dubious history.

• I find the statement near the beginning that “With auditory experiments such as sound impulses or questionnaires it can be investigated, based on the feedback from the listeners” doesn’t tell us much.
• I am quite mystified by this: “Neurological measurement methods are also used, e.g. determine the frequency range of the sound perception of individual letters”.
• The claim that “Auditory phonetics therefore focuses heavily on the neurophysiological and anatomical processes in hearing”, though based, apparently, on a source that I haven’t read and can’t get hold of, seems wrong. If Auditory phonetics comprises (as I believe it does) speech perception, then the subject must depend just as much on cognitive aspects of speech communication as on physiology and anatomy.
• We are told (without a reference) that “Georg von Békésy has put forward a theory that shows how language is processed in the ear and in the human brain”, but the idea of “language being processed in the ear” makes no sense.
• There is a table which attempts to pair physical properties with corresponding auditory sensations. Among the pairings we find “frequency” paired with “high”, and “duration” paired with “tone color”
• The attempt to explain categorical perception falls well short of the mark. It mixes up the segmentation of continuous speech into successive units with the perception of vowel and consonant differences along a continuum.

I won’t go on, but I would encourage you to read the whole thing and judge for yourself. The Talk page for this article shows that it is not well regarded and has had a somewhat troubled history. I think that as a general rule, any very broad, over-arching article tends to be less satisfactory than the more precisely focused topics that are subsumed under it, but it should still be possible to do better than this.
​
I think I will spend my remaining lockdown time revising the “Three A’s” articles one by one, starting with Auditory. Any suggestions gratefully received.