Phonetics: This is the study of speech sounds themselves. Phoneticians study both the production of speech sounds by the human speech organs (articulatory phonetics) and the properties of the sounds themselves (acoustic phonetics). Phoneticians are concerned with such questions as the following: …what are the sounds, from among all those that humans could make, that actually exist in the world’s languages? …what specially defines different “accents”? …can speakers be identified by “voiceprints”? ...what are the properties of sounds that would go into computerized speech synthesis?