Gunnar Fant

The overall aim of the book is to provide an integrated view of the separate stages of the speech chain, covering the production process, speech data analysis and speech perception. Analysis of information bearing elements of the speech signal have found applications in linguistic theory and in the knowledge base of speech technology with special reference to speech synthesis. The book contains 19 selected articles organized in 6 chapters: Speech research overview with a historical outline, Speech production and synthesis, The voice source, Speech analysis and features, Speech perception, Prosody. Each chapter is preceded by an introduction including suggestions for additional reading. (7) A list of all publications of the author since 1945 is included. It is supplemented by an ordering in categories. The articles have been selected to ensure a representative coverage of the field. Some of them, primarily those on speech acoustics and the human voice source were published earlier.

The overall aim of the book is to provide an integrated view of the separate stages of the speech chain, covering the production process, speech data analysis and speech perception. Analysis of information bearing elements of the speech signal have found applications in linguistic theory and in the knowledge base of speech technology with special reference to speech synthesis. The book contains 19 selected articles organized in 6 chapters: Speech research overview with a historical outline, Speech production and synthesis, The voice source, Speech analysis and features, Speech perception, Prosody. Each chapter is preceded by an introduction including suggestions for additional reading. (7) A list of all publications of the author since 1945 is included. It is supplemented by an ordering in categories. The articles have been selected to ensure a representative coverage of the field. Some of them, primarily those on speech acoustics and the human voice source were published earlier.

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.

This work attempts to describes the ultimate discrete components of language, their specific structure, and their articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual correlates, and surveys their utilization in the language of the world. First published in 1951, this edition contains an added paper on Tenseness and Laxness.