Coarticulation: Theory, Data, and Techniques

Acoustic phonetics is a relatively young science, having been systematized with the 1960 publication of Gunnar Fant's Acoustic Theory of Speech Production. Fant's text presented the theory buttressed by his own empirical work as well as by modeling efforts by scientists working in the United States, and the field of acoustic phonetics and its many associated disciplines speech physiology, speech perception, speech synthesis, and automatic speech and speaker recognition, to name a few was off and running. One of the scientists who performed some of the early, well-known modeling work was Professor Kenneth Stevens of MIT, who with Dr. Arthur House extended some of the concepts of the acoustic theory in novel ways. Now, Professor Stevens has written a text entitled Acoustic Phonetics, and it is a remarkable accomplishment. The text not only presents the stateof-the-art 40 years removed from Fant's book, but employs a probing, didactic approach that gives the material the feel of having evolved under the influence of teaching many students. This almost certainly accounts for the linear, crystal-clear way in which the information is developed and applied, and for the very creative use of figures and charts. It seems to me that after reading the ten chapters of this book, a motivated student or interested scientist with little or no previous knowledge of acoustic phonetics would know quite a lot about the subject, and in a fair amount of depth. This reader would also understand, very clearly, Professor Stevens' point of view about this material, summarized in the preface: ''The theme of this book is to explore these relations between the discrete linguistic features and their articulatory and acoustic manifestations'' p. vii.