On Matching the Speech Signal to Mechanisms of Production

Abstract

The traditional phonetician practices the art of describing speech sounds in auditory-articulatory terms. This description may furnish the data for the phonological analysis of a language. In acoustic phonetics, the major concern is with the speech signal itself. For some this means refined instrumental analysis to find characterizing features of phonemes; for others it also means determining the perceptual relevance of acoustic features. In both basic and applied speech research, investigators have been reluctant to give up hope of finding acoustic invariants for phonemes, at least for those of a single speaker's system. Certain approximations to acoustic invariance have been found for some phonemes, but in general this search has been more successful in the nonacoustic domain. While work on neuromuscular dimensions has not yet yielded a clear set of phonemic invariants, there seem to be rather stable correlations between articulatory events and phonemes. With the help of experimental findings from several laboratories, a multidimensional approach to an important phonological feature, voicing, is presented to illustrate this thesis.