Understanding speech in our native tongue seems natural and effortless; listening to speech in a nonnative language is a different experience. In this book, Anne Cutler argues that listening to speech is a process of native listening because so much of it is exquisitely tailored to the requirements of the native language. Her cross-linguistic study (drawing on experimental work in languages that range from English and Dutch to Chinese and Japanese) documents what is universal and what is language specific in the way we listen to spoken language. Cutler describes the formidable range of mental tasks we carry out, all at once, with astonishing speed and accuracy, when we listen. These include evaluating probabilities arising from the structure of the native vocabulary, tracking information to locate the boundaries between words, paying attention to the way the words are pronounced, and assessing not only the sounds of speech but prosodic information that spans sequences of sounds. She describes infant speech perception, the consequences of language-specific specialization for listening to other languages, the flexibility and adaptability of listening (to our native languages), and how language-specificity and universality fit together in our language processing system. Drawing on her four decades of work as a psycholinguist, Cutler documents the recent growth in our knowledge about how spoken-word recognition works and the role of language structure in this process. Her book is a significant contribution to a vibrant and rapidly developing field.

This edited volume investigates the role of phonetics and phonology in psycholinguistics. Speaking and understanding spoken language both engage phonological and phonetic knowledge. There are detailed models of phonological and phonetic encoding in language production and there are equally refined models of phonetic and phonological processing in language comprehension. However, since most psycholinguists work on either language production or comprehension, the relationship between the two has received surprisingly little attention. Prominent researchers in various areas of psycholinguistics were invited to discuss this relationship focusing on the phonological and phonetic components.

The only volume to offer hands-on information about the wide range of research philosophies, methods and tools used across linguistics, phonetics, and speech science, as applied to disordered speech and language. • Covers core topics for students undertaking their own research, including experimental and qualitative methods, sociolinguistics, corpus construction and analysis, data recording, transcription and digital analysis of speech, and speech imaging. • Considers the research ethics associated with working with people who have speech, language or other communication difficulties. • Includes a detailed discussion of the dissemination of research results, and advice on the writing of theses and dissertations, and on the writing and publishing of journal articles, as well the peer review process. • Offers students and researchers from a variety of entry points -- such as linguistics, education, psychology, and speech pathology -- an introduction to the scope of research in clinical linguistics and phonetics, and a practical guide to this interdisciplinary field

This book is a comprehensive guide to the International Phonetic Alphabet, widely used for over a century to transcribe the sounds of languages. The Handbook is in three parts: Part I contains an introduction to phonetic description and exemplification of the use of phonetic symbols; Part II consists of twenty-nine "Illustrations" of the application of the International Phonetic Alphabet to a range of languages; and Part III covers speech pathology, computer codings, and the history of the IPA. This is an essential reference work for phoneticians and linguists more generally.

Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences provides an authoritative account of the key topics in both theoretical and applied areas of speech communication, written by an international team of leading scholars and practitioners. Combines new and influential research, along with articulate overviews of the key topics in theoretical and applied areas of speech communication Accessibly structured into five major sections covering: experimental phonetics; biological perspectives; modelling speech production and perception; linguistic phonetics; and speech technology Includes nine entirely new chapters on topics such as phonetic notation and sociophonetics, speech technology, biological perspectives, and prosody A streamlined and re-oriented structure brings all contributions up-to-date with the latest research, whilst maintaining the features that made the first edition so useful

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.