An introductory text on speech acoustics with a primary focus on American English. The second edition includes new information on acoustic theory, methods of acoustic analysis, acoustic properties of vowels and consonants, acoustic correlates of speaker variables and suprasegmentals, and speech synthesis. The authors are a speech pathologist (Kent) and linguist (Read) at the U. of Wisconsin-Madison. The text assumes familiarity with elementary acoustic concepts such as waveforms, spectra, resonance, and decibels. c. Book News Inc.

The text sets out in simple and accessible terms the various methods of acoustic analysis of speech, placing them in their historical context, allowing a better understanding of the mathematical and technical solutions adopted today in phonetics and experimental phonology. Without mathematical complications, the operating bases of the many speech analysis software currently available are exposed so that everyone can understand the limits and avoid errors and misinterpretations in their implementation.

Techniques in Speech Acoustics provides an introduction to the acoustic analysis and characteristics of speech sounds. The first part of the book covers aspects of the source-filter decomposition of speech, spectrographic analysis, the acoustic theory of speech production and acoustic phonetic cues. The second part is based on computational techniques for analysing the acoustic speech signal including digital time and frequency analyses, formant synthesis, and the linear predictive coding of speech. There is also an introductory chapter on the classification of acoustic speech signals which is relevant to aspects of automatic speech and talker recognition. The book intended for use as teaching materials on undergraduate and postgraduate speech acoustics and experimental phonetics courses; also aimed at researchers from phonetics, linguistics, computer science, psychology and engineering who wish to gain an understanding of the basis of speech acoustics and its application to fields such as speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition.

This analysis of speech ranges from clarifying physiological, biological and neurological bases of speech through defining the principles of electrical and computer models of speech production.

This book assembles major writings in speech production and phonetics of the pioneering Gunnar Fant, along with his more recent work on speech prosody. The book reviews the stages of the speech chain, covering production, speech data analysis and speech perception. 19 selected articles are grouped in 6 chapters, including a historical outline plus Speech production and synthesis; The voice source; Speech analysis and features; Speech perception; Prosody.

This book presents the most contemporary and comprehensive description of the acoustics of the sounds used in American English. Intended to serve as an introductory text for students and professionals interested in acoustic phonetics, linguistics, physics, electrical engineering, and computer science, the authors bring to the subject the points of view of both linguistics and physics. The book uses numerous examples of acoustic spectrograms to show the continuities and variability of natural speech. The book begins by introducing the basic concepts of phonetics, phonology, and linguistics to readers whose background is in physics or engineering and introducing the physics of sound generation and analysis for speech scientists and linguists. The authors then use the tools developed in the first part to examine the characteristics of individual phonemes as well as the changes introduced when individual sounds are combined in speech. Modern applications of speech acoustics, especially speech synthesis and recognition, are also discussed.

A clear account of the physical process of speech production and communication, which will be of interest to psycholinguists as well as phoneticians.