Ken Stevens and linguistic phonetics

Abstract

While almost all of Ken Stevens’s research has been influential in linguistic phonetics—especially his work on the quantal nature of speech and on enhancement theory—this presentation will focus more on aspects not covered by others in this session. A noteworthy aspect of Ken’s career is that he frequently collaborated with linguists, notably in research on phonetic features and their structure. In work with Blumstein and with Halle, he provided acoustic correlates of place of articulation, laryngeal, and nasalization features. Much of this work is summarized in his 1980 paper in JASA, “Acoustic correlates of some phonetic categories.” In work with Keyser, he suggested an overall organization of features to define major classes of sounds. This work was published in linguistics journals, e.g., their 1994 paper in Phonology, “Feature geometry and the vocal tract.” Ken’s importance to linguistics, as an engineer interested in linguistic sound systems and eager to work with phoneticians and phonologists, cannot be overestimated, and is a legacy continued by many of his students.