Acoustic Phonetics

This book presents a theory of speech-sound generation in the human vocalsystem. The comprehensive acoustic theory serves as one basis for definingcategories of speech sounds used to form distinctions between words in languages.The author begins with a review of the anatomy and physiology of speech production, then covers source mechanisms, the vocal tract as an acoustic filter, relevantaspects of auditory psychophysics and physiology, and phonological representations.In the remaining chapters he presents a detailed examination of vowels, consonants, and the influence of context on speech-sound production. Although he focuses mainlyon the sounds of English, he touches briefly on sounds in other languages.The bookwill serve as a reference for speech scientists, speech pathologists, linguistsinterested in phonetics and phonology, psychologists interested in speech perceptionand production, and engineers concerned with speech processingapplications.