Speech Sounds and Features (Current Studies in Linguistics)

This is a representative collection of the work of one of the world's leading scholars in the area of speech acoustics. It follows the development over the past 15 years of research presented in the author's previous publications on speech analysis, feature theory, and applications to language descriptions. Most of the articles have had very restricted distribution—many appearing only in the Quarterly Progress Reports issued by Dr. Fant's laboratory. The first part of the book covers manifold aspects of speech analysis such as instrumental techniques, spectrum data, formant statistics with an emphasis on Swedish vowels and stops, speaker dependencies, normalization procedures, production theory, and coarticulation. The second part analyzes established feature systems and suggests revisions and general discussions on the concept of distinctive features, perception, and the applicability of feature theory to automatic speech recognition. Articles in this part of the book are especially valuable because they represent Dr. Fant's work on "inherent" features and their phonetic correlates as it has evolved since his collaboration in 1952 with Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle. Speech Sounds and Features is the fourth volume in the series Current Studies in Linguistics.