In Memoriam: Ralph L. Vanderslice and Gunnar Fant

Abstract

RALPH L. VANDERSLICE, who contributed to many areas of phonetics, died on 24 August 2008, aged 78, in Portland, Oregon. He was born on 2 January 1930 in South Bend, Indiana. He received his B.A. and his M.Sc. in speech and theatre from Michigan State College (now Michigan State University) in 1951 and 1954, respectively. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Vermont and Hawai'i. He moved to UCLA where, in 1968, he obtained his Ph.D. His dissertation, Synthetic Elocution (http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclaling/wpp/No8/), was an exploration of the character and some of the specifics of the rules that would be necessary to implement the prosodic aspects of synthesized speech produced by a reading machine. Peter Ladefoged was the chair of his dissertation committee and Victoria Fromkin one of the other members. While still a student at UCLA Ralph Vanderslice was an expert witness testifying against the validity of ‘voiceprints’ (the use of spectrographic displays of speech to identify suspects in criminal trials). He was very much a ‘hands-on’ person, skilled in many of the mechanical and electronic arts, one manifestation of this being his invention of the ‘crico-thyrometer’, a device that could track vertical larynx movement in connected speech. He subsequently taught at City University of New York and Yale University. He published many papers on speech prosody, notably ‘Binary suprasegmental features and transformational word-accentuation rules’ (1972, Language, with Peter Ladefoged). His colleagues, including this author, his office-mate in the UCLA Phonetics Lab, remember him for his erudition, wit, and generosity in helping others with everything from providing references to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works on phonetics (which he was steeped in) to repairing a shorted circuit in an amplifier. His salutary influence continues.