Vowels and Consonants

This popular and accessible introduction to phonetics has been fully updated for its third edition, and now includes an accompanying website with sound files, and expanded coverage of topics such as speech technology. Describes how languages use a variety of different sounds, many of them quite unlike any that occur in well-known languages Written by the late Peter Ladefoged, one of the world's leading phoneticians, with updates by renowned forensic linguist, Sandra Ferrari Disner Includes numerous revisions to the discussion of speech technology and additional updates throughout the book Explores the acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual components of speech, demonstrates speech synthesis, and explains how speech recognition systems work Supported by an accompanying website at www.vowelsandconsonants3e.com featuring additional data and recordings of the sounds of a wide variety of languages, to reinforce learning and bring the descriptions to life

Table of Contents:
Table of Web Content ix Author’s Preface from the First Edition xiii Preface to the Third Edition xiv Acknowledgments from the Previous Editions xvi The International Phonetic Alphabet xviii 1 Sounds and Languages 1 1.1 Languages Come and Go 1 1.2 The Evolving Sounds of Languages 4 1.3 Language and Speech 5 1.4 Describing Speech Sounds 6 1.5 Summary 9 2 Pitch and Loudness 11 2.1 Tones 11 2.2 English Intonation 14 2.3 The Vocal Folds 20 2.4 Loudness Differences 23 2.5 Summary 24 3 Vowel Contrasts 26 3.1 Sets of Vowels and Standard Forms of a Language 26 3.2 English Vowels 28 3.3 Summary 31 4 The Sounds of Vowels 32 4.1 Acoustic Structure of Vowels 32 4.2 The Acoustic Vowel Space 35 4.3 Spectrographic Displays 37 4.4 Summary 38 5 Charting Vowels 39 5.1 Formants One and Two 39 5.2 Accents of English 43 5.3 Formant Three 46 5.4 Summary 47 6 The Sounds of Consonants 48 6.1 Consonant Contrasts 48 6.2 Stop Consonants 48 6.3 Approximants 53 6.4 Nasals 54 6.5 Fricatives 55 6.6 Summary 60 7 Acoustic Components of Speech 62 7.1 The Principal Acoustic Components 62 7.2 Synthesizing Speech 64 7.3 Summary 67 8 Talking Computers 68 8.1 Words in Context 68 8.2 Our Implicit Knowledge 72 8.3 Synthesizing Sounds from a Phonetic Transcription 75 8.4 Applications 78 8.5 Summary 81 9 Listening Computers 82 9.1 Patterns of Sound 82 9.2 The Basis of Computer Speech Recognition 87 9.3 Special Context Speech Recognizers 89 9.4 Recognizing Running Speech 90 9.5 Different Accents and Different Voices 94 9.6 More for the Computationally Curious 96 9.7 Summary 97 10 How We Listen to Speech 99 10.1 Confusable Sounds 99 10.2 Sound Prototypes 103 10.3 Tackling the Problem 107 10.4 Finding Words 109 10.5 Social Interactions 110 10.6 Summary 112 10.7 Further Reading and Sources 112 11 Making English Consonants 114 11.1 Acoustics and Articulation 114 11.2 The Vocal Organs 115 11.3 Places and Manners of Articulation 117 11.4 Describing Consonants 119 11.5 Summary 122 12 Making English Vowels 123 12.1 Movements of the Tongue and Lips for Vowels 123 12.2 Muscles Controlling the Tongue and Lips 126 12.3 Traditional Descriptions of Vowels 129 12.4 Summary 134 13 Actions of the Larynx 135 13.1 The Larynx 135 13.2 Voiced and Voiceless Sounds 137 13.3 Voicing and Aspiration 138 13.4 Glottal Stops 140 13.5 Breathy Voice 141 13.6 Creaky Voice 145 13.7 Further Differences in Vocal Fold Vibrations 148 13.8 Ejectives 149 13.9 Implosives 151 13.10 Recording Data from the Larynx 152 13.11 Summary 155 14 Consonants Around the World 156 14.1 Phonetic Fieldwork 156 14.2 Well-Known Consonants 158 14.3 More Places of Articulation 159 14.4 More Manners of Articulation 167 14.5 Clicks 172 14.6 Summary 175 15 Vowels Around the World 176 15.1 Types of Vowels 176 15.2 Lip Rounding 178 15.3 Nasalized Vowels 182 15.4 Voice Quality 184 15.5 Summary 185 16 Putting Vowels and Consonants Together 186 16.1 The Speed of Speech 186 16.2 Slips of the Tongue 188 16.3 The Alphabet 188 16.4 The International Phonetic Alphabet 192 16.5 Contrasting Sounds 193 16.6 Features that Matter within a Language 195 16.7 Summary 199 Glossary 200 Further Reading 205 Index 206

About the Author :
Peter Ladefoged (1925-2006) was Research Phonetician and Professor of Phonetics Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was Director of the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory from 1962 to 1991 and was president of the Linguistic Society of America. He is the author of numerous books, including The Sounds of the World's Languages (with I. Maddieson, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), Phonetic Data Analysis (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), and A Course in Phonetics, Sixth Edition (with Keith Johnson, 2010). Sandra Ferrari Disner teaches general and forensic linguistics at the University of Southern California. She has over 25 years of experience in speech technology, having developed commercial text-to-speech and speech-recognition systems in five languages, as well as the world's first talking video games.

Review :
“The book is of interest to teachers and would help to develop readers' perception of speech production and their competence in spoken English. It is a 'must have' book that adds richness and knowledge to individuals and libraries.”  (Linguist, 31 October 2012)