Coarticulation 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.

This book presents an experimental-phonetic approach to the study of intonation, defined as the ensemble of pitch variations in speech. It gives a detailed explication of the analysis of intonation by means of the stylization method: studying the perceptual consequences of deliberate simplifications of speech melody makes it possible to give a description in terms of perceptually relevant, discrete events. Theoretical insights and the acoustic, perceptual, and physiological experimental evidence that supports them are amply discussed. Phoneticians and speech scientists will find the...

How reliably can individuals be recognised by their voices? This question has recently been the subject of much debate among speech researchers and forensic scientists and the controversial and crucial nature of that debate has stimulated a wide range of empirical research. In this book Dr Nolan argues convincingly that both the design and interpretation of many of these experiments are vitiated by the lack of a comprehensive model of variability between speakers and within the speech of an individual. This volume clearly demonstrates that any valid theory of speaker recognition must...