Speech Production

Speech Production: Models, Phonetic Processes and Techniques brings together researchers from many different disciplines - computer science, dentistry, engineering, linguistics, phonetics, physiology, psychology - all with a special interest in how speech is produced. From the initial neural program to the end acoustic signal, it provides an overview of several dominant models in the speech production literature, as well as up-to-date accounts of persistent theoretical issues in the area. A particular focus is on the evaluation of information gleaned from instrumental investigations of the speech production process, including MRI, PET, ultra-sound, video-imaging, EMA, EPG, X-ray, computer simulation - and many others. The research presented in this volume considers questions such as: the feed-back vs. feed-forward control of speech; the acoustic/auditory vs. articulatory/somato-sensory domains of speech planning; the innateness of human speech; the possible architecture of a speech production model; and the realization of prosodic structure in speech. Leaders in speech research from around the world have contributed their most recent work to this volume.

The Handbook of Speech Production is the first reference work to provide an overview of this burgeoning area of study. Twenty-four chapters written by an international team of authors examine issues in speech planning, motor control, the physical aspects of speech production, and external factors that impact speech production. Contributions bring together behavioral, clinical, computational, developmental, and neuropsychological perspectives on speech production to create a rich and truly interdisciplinary resource Offers a novel and timely contribution to the literature and showcases a broad spectrum of research in speech production, methodological advances, and modeling Coverage of planning, motor control, articulatory coordination, the speech mechanism, and the effect of language on production processes

Speech sound production is one of the most complex human activities: it is also one of the least well understood. This is perhaps not altogether surprising as many of the complex neurological and physiological processes involved in the generation and execution of a speech utterance remain relatively inaccessible to direct investigation, and must be inferred from careful scrutiny of the output of the system -from details of the movements of the speech organs themselves and the acoustic consequences of such movements. Such investigation of the speech output have received considerable impetus during the last decade from major technological advancements in computer science and biological transducing, making it possible now to obtain large quantities of quantative data on many aspects of speech articulation and acoustics relatively easily. Keeping pace with these advancements in laboratory techniques have been developments in theoretical modelling of the speech production process. There are now a wide variety of different models available, reflecting the different disciplines involved -linguistics, speech science and technology, engineering and acoustics. The time seems ripe to attempt a synthesis of these different models and theories and thus provide a common forum for discussion of the complex problem of speech production. Such an activity would seem particularly timely also for those colleagues in speech technology seeking better, more accurate phonetic models as components in their speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition systems.

This monograph arose from a conference on the Production of Speech held at the University of Texas at Austin on April 28-30, 1981. It was sponsored by the Center for Cognitive Science, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Linguistics and Psychology Departments. The conference was the second in a series of conferences on human experimental psychology: the first, held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Psychology Department, resulted in publication of the monograph Neural Mechanisms in Behavior, D. McFadden (Ed.), Springer-Verlag, 1980. The choice of the particular topic of the second conference was motivated by the belief that the state of knowledge of speech production had recently reached a critical mass, and that a good deal was to be gained from bringing together the foremost researchers in this field. The benefits were the opportunity for the participants to compare notes on their common problems, the publication of a monograph giving a comprehensive state-of-the-art picture of this research area, and the provision of enormous intellectual stimulus for local students of this topic.

The idea that speech is a dynamic process is a tautology: whether from the standpoint of the talker, the listener, or the engineer, speech is an action, a sound, or a signal continuously changing in time. Yet, because phonetics and speech science are offspring of classical phonology, speech has been viewed as a sequence of discrete events-positions of the articulatory apparatus, waveform segments, and phonemes. Although this perspective has been mockingly referred to as "beads on a string", from the time of Henry Sweet's 19th century treatise almost up to our days specialists of speech science and speech technology have continued to conceptualize the speech signal as a sequence of static states interleaved with transitional elements reflecting the quasi-continuous nature of vocal production. This book, a collection of papers of which each looks at speech as a dynamic process and highlights one of its particularities, is dedicated to the memory of Ludmilla Andreevna Chistovich. At the outset, it was planned to be a Chistovich festschrift but, sadly, she passed away a few months before the book went to press. The 24 chapters of this volume testify to the enormous influence that she and her colleagues have had over the four decades since the publication of their 1965 monograph.

This extremely up-to-date book, Speech Production and Second Language Acquisition, is the first volume in the exciting new series, Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition. This new volume provides a thorough overview of the field and proposes a new integrative model of how L2 speech is produced. The study of speech production is its own subfield within cognitive science. One of the aims of this new book, as is true of the series, is to make cognitive science theory accessible to second language acquisition. Speech Production and Second Language Acquisition examines how research on second language and bilingual speech production can be grounded in L1 research conducted in cognitive science and in psycholinguistics. Highlighted is a coherent and straightforward introduction to the bilingual lexicon and its role in spoken language performance. Like the rest of the series, Speech Production and Second Language Acquisition is tutorial in style, intended as a supplementary textbook for undergraduates and graduate students in programs of cognitive science, second language acquisition, applied linguistics, and language pedagogy.

The first textbook providing an integrated model of spoken language