Coarticulation: Theory, Data and Techniques (Cambridge Studies in Speech Science and Communication) Review

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Coarticulation: Theory, Data and Techniques (Cambridge Studies in Speech Science and Communication) ReviewBecause this is a collection of papers by different authors, quality and style vary from chapter to chapter, but there are few wasted words, and hardly a sentence without a kernel idea worth taking the time to understand. On the other hand, it is a difficult and demanding book to read cover to cover, and most readers will probably prefer to focus on areas of particular personal interest rather than tackling the whole volume at one go.
Chapter 1, entitled "The origin of coarticulation", discusses what causes coarticulation, a history of the investigation of coarticulation, and how coarticulation develops in children¡¦s speech. A series of coarticulatory models is reviewed, including Lindblom's 'target undershoot' model of the 1960s (p. 16), Oehman's observation that two vowels interact with each other across intervening stops (p. 17), Wickelgren's idea that we store not phonemes in our brains but collections of context-sensitive allophones (p. 18), up to Keating's 'window' model of the 1980s (p. 21), in which every feature of a segment is associated with a range of values rather than an absolute target.
Part II is entitled "Research results: components of the motor system for speech". Each chapter features a key articulatory organ or organ complex: the velopharyngeal complex, the tongue, the larynx, the lips, and the lips and jaws.
Part III provides a home, under the catch-all classification of "Wider perspectives", for two chapters that did not quite fit elsewhere, "Cross-language studies on articulation" and "Implications for phonological theory".
The chapters of part IV, "Instrumental Techniques", report on the state of the art of various specialized methods and instruments for performing articulatory and acoustic measurements. The methods presented are: palatography, X-ray, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, electromagnetic articulography (EMMA), electromyography, transducers for investigating velopharyngeal function (including aerometry, electromyography, various acoustic methods, radiography, endoscopy, photodetection, various mechanical devices, ultrasound, MRI, and EMMA), and techniques for investigating laryngeal articulation (including fibreoptic endoscopy, transillumination, electromyography, pulse-echo ultrasound, acoustic analysis with inverse filtering, glottography, and the Sondhi tube).
The final chapter of the book addresses use of the spectrograph and other acoustic tools in studying coarticulatory phenomena. This chapter gives examples of how to do acoustic analysis of formant transitions, the stable portion of a vowel, stop release, fricative noise, nasals, liquids and glides, voicing and tone, and duration and intensity. This is a laudable beginning, but there is room for much more to be done in this area.
While this book is overall very tight in structure and rich in content, it is not by any means the do-all, end-all work on coarticulation. There are a number of areas not covered in this book that I would like to have seen, and hope to see in future works, such as: what really happens between *words* in running discourse?
This book is a good beginning of more serious and concentrated work on coarticulatory phenomena than has previously been seen. Hopefully many more such studies will follow.Coarticulation: Theory, Data and Techniques (Cambridge Studies in Speech Science and Communication) OverviewCoarticulation means the overlapping gestures that occur during the pronunciation of any sequence of speech sounds. This topic in the science of phonetics provides a challenge to speech production theory as well as to various projects in the field of speech technology, including that of building a natural sounding speech synthesizer. The eighteen chapters in this book cover the experimental techniques used for investigating the phenomenon, the experimental findings to date, and the theoretical background.

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