Phonetics A Practical Introduction

Speech is the most effective medium humans use to exchange and transmit knowledge, ideas and experiences. It exists physiologically as neural and muscular activity, and subsequent articulatory, acoustic and auditory events, and as an abstract, rule-governed system at the psychological level. Together, both levels produce communication by speech. To appreciate speech and its communicative function, all of its characteristics must be understood. This book offers the most comprehensive and accessible coverage of the three areas of phonetics: articulatory, acoustic, and auditory or speech perception. Students without a linguistics background can be daunted by phonetics, so clear language is used to define linguistics and phonetics concepts with examples and illustrations to ensure understanding. Furthermore, each chapter concludes with comprehension exercises to reinforce understanding. Online exercises and recordings of speech stimuli from various languages provide additional opportunity to hone perception, production, phonetic transcription skills and acoustic analysis measurement practice.

1. Speech articulation: manner and place; 2. Airstream mechanisms and phonation types; 3. Suprasegmentals; 4. Transcribing speech; 5. Phonemic and morphophonemic analyses; 6. Basic acoustics; 7. Digital signal processing; 8. Acoustic properties of vowels and consonants; 9. Hearing; 10. Speech perception; 11. Experimental tools in articulatory phonetics; Index.

Ratree Wayland is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics of the University of Florida. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Cornell University. Her doctoral research on acoustic and perceptual investigation of breathy and clear phonation in Khmer (Cambodian) spoken in Thailand was sponsored by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad grant. She was an National Institutes of Health (NIH) post-doctoral fellow at the biocommunication laboratory, University of Alabama, conducting research focusing on second language speech learning. She has published extensively on phonetics of various languages, particularly on cross-language perception and production of lexical tones. Her work was supported by grants from the NIH.