Speech Sounds & Features: Current Studies in Linguistics

This is a representative collection of the work of one of the world'sleading scholars in the area of speech acoustics. It follows the development overthe past 15 years of research presented in the author's previous publications onspeech analysis, feature theory, and applications to language descriptions. Most ofthe articles have had very restricted distribution -- many appearing only in theQuarterly Progress Reports issued by Dr. Fant's laboratory.The first part of thebook 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, andcoarticulation. The second part analyzes established feature systems and suggestsrevisions 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 evolvedsince his collaboration in 1952 with Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle.Speech Soundsand Features is the fourth volume in the series Current Studies inLinguistics.