What does acoustic phonetics study?

Acoustic phonetics is specifically concerned with the physical properties of sound waves produced during speech. This area of study examines how speech sounds are generated, transmitted, and perceived, focusing on properties such as frequency, amplitude, and duration, which pertain to the sound waves' characteristics. Understanding these properties allows researchers to analyze how different sounds can be represented acoustically and how they vary across different languages or contexts.

The other options, while relevant within the broader field of phonetics, do not accurately describe the focus of acoustic phonetics. For instance, speech sound production relates more to articulatory phonetics, which examines how speech sounds are generated by the movement of the vocal tract. The listener's response to speech would fall under perceptual phonetics, which studies how sounds are interpreted and understood by listeners. Data analysis in speech labs is a technical aspect related to the practical application of phonetics and may involve various methods, but it is not the primary focus of acoustic phonetics itself.