Describing how people talk requires recording and analyzing phonetic data. This is true for researchers investigating the variant pronunciations of street names in Los Angeles, missionaries translating the Bible into a little-known tongue, and scholars obtaining data from a carefully controlled group in a laboratory experiment. Phonetic Data Analysis examines the procedures involved in describing the sounds of a language and illustrates the basic techniques of experimental phonetics, most of them requiring little more than a tape recorder, a video camera, and a computer.
This book enables readers to work with a speaker in a classroom setting or to go out into the field and make their own discoveries about how the sounds of a language are made. Peter Ladefoged, one of the world's leading phoneticians, introduces the experimental phonetic techniques for describing the major phonetic characteristics of any language. Throughout the book there are also comments, written in a more anecdotal fashion, on Ladefoged's own fieldwork.

《语音学教程(第5版)》内容简介：经过全面修订后的《语音学教程》反映了语音研究的最新进展，内容包括了描写英语和世界其他语言语音所需的所有术语、概念和音标。第五版新增了标音练习和语调说明，进一步解释了发音活动。《语音学教程(第5版)》主流理论将发音描述成为一系列由发音器官所产生的音姿，这是对发音音系学的一种全新阐释。书中还更广泛地阐释了声学语音学。它们为我们展现了本领域研究的全貌。《语音学教程(第5版)》适用于语音学研究者、从事语音和语音学教学的老师、语言学研究生及相关人士。

This book describes all the known ways in which the sounds of the world's languages differ. Encapsulating the work of two leading figures in the field, it will be a standard work of reference for researchers in phonetics, linguistics and speech science for many years to come. The scope of the book is truly global, with data drawn from nearly 400 languages, many of them investigated at first hand by the authors.