= Phonetician
A <phonetician> studies the physical production, transmission or perception of <speech>. <Articulatory phonetics> investigates the moving <vocal tract>, <acoustic phonetics> measures recorded <sound>, and <auditory phonetics> studies listeners' responses. One research question can require evidence from more than one of these stages.
For example, a <phonetician> investigating a vowel contrast can record repeated tokens, estimate <formants> and test whether listeners distinguish the recordings. Speaker variation and analysis settings must be controlled or measured before differences are attributed to the contrast. <Praat> provides tools for waveform, <spectrogram>, <pitch contour> and <formant> analysis, making several of these observations reproducible.<Praat: doing phonetics by computer by Paul Boersma and David Weenink>[Intro, speech analysis and experimental capabilities]{ref} The profession therefore connects <language> questions to instruments, explicit annotation rules and testable measurements.
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