Blackwell Reference Online

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In the production of speech, an acoustic signal is formed when the vocal organs move, resulting in a pattern of disturbance to the air molecules in the airstream that is propagated outwards in all directions eventually reaching the ear of the listener. Acoustic phonetics is concerned with describing the different kinds of acoustic signal that the movement of the vocal organs gives rise to in the production of speech by male and female speakers across all age groups and in all languages, and under different speaking conditions and varieties of speaking style. Just about every field that is covered in this book needs to make use of some aspect of acoustic phonetics. With the ubiquity of PCs and the freely available software for making spectrograms, for processing speech signals, and for labeling speech data, it is also an area of experimental phonetics that is very readily accessible.Our knowledge of acoustic phonetics is derived from various different kinds of inquiry that can be grouped loosely into three areas that derive primarily from the contact of phonetics with the disciplines of engineering/electronics, linguistics/ phonology, and psychology/cognitive science respectively.1 The acoustic theory of speech production. These studies assume an idealized model of the vocal tract in order to predict how different vocal tract shapes and actions contribute to the acoustic signal (Stevens ... log in or subscribe to read full text