Speech Sounds

Speech Sounds contains maps of the mouth. As an atlas is a collection of maps in book form; so this book contains a collection of images or maps that have captured different aspects of the production of the consonants and vowels of English. As an atlas highlights topographies and landmarks, this book highlights relevant articulatory and acoustic aspects for the production for each English speech sound. Each chapter profiles a different English consonant or vowel. There are 24 chapters to describe each English consonant and 11 chapters to describe most English vowels and diphthongs. Analytic comments are presented for each chapter. These comments focus on key dimensions of speech production and speech acoustics that differentiate one speech sound from another. Within each chapter there are at least six different representations for the profiled speech sound organised according to static and dynamic representations. The static representations include: a photograph of the lower portion of the face, a schematic drawing of tongue position, an ultrasound image of the tongue, and electropalatographic images of tongue/palate contact. Dynamic representations profile words containing each speech sound and include a filmstrip, sound spectrogram, and continuous electropalatographic frames of tongue/palate contact. For each of the lingual consonants, multiple images demonstrating inter- and intra-speaker variability are also included. These images have been compiled from a comprehensive research project (McLeod, 2003) of eight typical English adults' productions of lingual speech sounds in word-initial and word-final contexts within five vowel environments. An important feature of Speech Sounds is that data from an extensive range of research papers have been assembled to demonstrate similarities and differences between productions of speech sounds by adults and children, speakers of different English dialects, speakers of languages other t