Table of Contents

Preface. Acknowledgements. Part I: Sounds and Languages: 1. The Sounds of Language Evolve. 2. Language and Speech. 3. Describing Speech Sounds. 4. Summary. Part II: Pitch and Loudness: 5. Tones. 6. English Intonation. 7. The Vocal Folds. 8. Loudness Differences. 9. Summary. Part III: Vowel Contrasts: 10. Sets of Vowels in a Language. 11. English Vowels. 12. Summary. Part IV: The Sounds of Vowels: 13. Acoustic Structure of Vowels. 14. The Acoustic Vowel Space. 15. Sound Spectrograms. 16. Summary. Part V: Charting vowels: 17. Formants one and two. 18. Comparing English Vowels. 19. Formant three. 20. Summary. Part VI: The Sounds of Consonants: 21. Consonant Contrasts. 22. Stop Consonants. 23. Approximants. 24. Nasals. 25. Fricatives. 26. Summary. Part VII: Acoustic Components of Speech: 27. The Principal Acoustic Components. 28. Synthesizing Speech. 29. Summary. Part VIII: Talking Computers: 30. How Writing must be Pronounced. 31. Words and Sounds in Sentences. 32. Synthesizing Sounds from a Phonetic Transcription. 33. Summary. Part IX: Listening Computers: 34. Identifying Sounds. 35. The Basis of Computer Speech Recognition. 36. Special Context Speech Recognizers. 37. Recognizing Running Speech. 38. Different Accents and Different Voices. 39. More for the computationally curious. 40. Summary. Part X: Making English Consonants: 41. Acoustics and Articulations. 42. The Vocal Organs. 43. Places and Manners of Articulation. 44. Describing Consonants. 45. Summary. Part XI: Making English Vowels: 46. Movements of the Tongue and Lip for Vowels. 47. Muscles controlling the Tongue and Lip. 48. Traditional Descriptions of Vowels. 49. Summary. Part XII: Actions of the Larynx: 50. Voiced and Voiceless Sounds. 51. Voicing and Aspiration. 52. Glottal Stops. 53. Breathy Voice. 54. Creaky Voice. 55. Further Differences in Vocal Fold Vibrations. 56. Ejectives. 57. Implosives. 58. Recording Data on Larynx Actions. 59. Summary. Part XIII: Consonants Around the World: 60. Phonetic Fieldwork. 61. Well Known Consonants. 62. More Places of Articulation. 63. More Manners of Articulation. 64. Clicks. 65. Summary. Part XIV: Vowels around the World: 66. Types of Vowels. 67. Lip Rounding. 68. Nasalized Vowels. 69. Voice Quality. 70. Summary. Part XV: Putting Vowels and Consonants Together: 71. The Speed of Speech. 72. The Alphabet. 73. Slips of the Tongue and the Ear. 74. The International Phonetic Alphabet. 75. Contrasting Sounds. 76. Features that Matter within a Language. 77. Summary.

About the Author

Peter Ladefoged, UCLA Research Phonetician and Professor of Phonetics Emeritus, was Director of the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory from 1962 to 1991. He is author of Sounds of the World's Languages (with Ian Maddieson, Blackwell 1996), Elements of Acoustic Phonetics (second edition, 1996), and A Course in Phonetics (fourth edition, 2000).

Reviews

"This is a fascinating, accessible, and reader-friendly book by a master phonetician, about how speech sounds are made, and how they can be analyzed. Being able to hear the sounds under discussion, on the accompanying CD, is really useful. I warmly recommend the book to everyone with an interest, professional or otherwise, in spoken language." John Laver, University of Edinburgh
"This is a radically new introduction to phonetics. The use of examples is imaginative and the book is written with infectious enthusiasm. It will change the way we introduce students to phonetics." Peter J. Roach, University of Reading
"Only Peter Ladefoged, the world's leading phonetician, could produce a work like this: an authoritative and thorough introduction to phonetics written in a style that can be understood by a reader with no prior background in linguistics." John Ohala, University of California, Berkeley
"[This book] lucidly discusses issues that are not commonly covered in introductions to phonetics, including computerised speech synthesis and recognition, which ties in with a major focus on acoustics from the first chapter onwards." Times Higher Education Supplement