Henning Reetz - Phonetics: Transcription, Production, Acoustics, and Perception

Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics

The books included in this series provide comprehensive accounts of some of the most central and most rapidly developing areas of research in linguistics. Intended primarily for introductory and post-introductory students, they include exercises, discussion points and suggestions for further reading.

This edition first published 2009

Henning Reetz and Allard Jongman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reetz, Henning.

Phonetics : transcription, production, acoustics and perception / Henning Reetz and Allard Jongman.

p. cm. (Blackwell textbooks in linguistics ; 22)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-631-23225-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-631-23226-1

(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Phonetics. 2. Speech. I. Jongman, Allard. II. Title.

P221.R37 2009

414.8dc22

2007052357

Phonetics is traditionally subdivided into three areas: articulatory phonetics concerns the way in which speech is produced and requires an understanding of the physiology of the speaking apparatus; acoustic phonetics investigates the acoustic characteristics of speech such as frequency, intensity, and duration, and requires knowledge of sound waves; auditory phonetics addresses the perception of speech and requires awareness of the function of the auditory system and memory. Phonetics thus spans several related disciplines, including linguistics, biology, physics, and psychology. In addition, students of phonetics should be familiar with phonetic transcription, the use of a set of symbols to write speech sounds.

Some courses in phonetics cover primarily articulatory phonetics and phonetic transcription while others focus on acoustic or auditory phonetics. However, in our teaching experience, we have found it more rewarding to combine these subjects in a single course. For example, certain speech patterns are better explained from an articulatory point of view while others may be more readily motivated in terms of auditory factors. For these reasons, we decided to write this textbook.

This book covers in detail all four areas that comprise phonetics: articulatory, acoustic, and auditory phonetics as well as phonetic transcription. It is aimed at students of speech from a variety of disciplines (including linguistics, speech pathology, audiology, psychology, and electrical engineering). While it is meant as an introductory course, many areas of phonetics are discussed in more detail than is typically the case for an introductory text. Depending on their purpose, readers (and instructors) will probably differ in terms of the amount of detail they require. Due to the books step-wise approach, later chapters are accessible even if sections (for example, those containing too much technical detail) of preceding chapters are skipped. While some technical detail is, of course, inevitable (for example, to understand a spectrogram), little knowledge of physics or mathematics beyond the high school level is required. Technical concepts are introduced with many examples. In addition, more advanced technical information can be found in Appendices A amd B in order to maintain a readable text. This book thus employs a modular format to provide comprehensive coverage of all areas of phonetics with sufficient detail to challenge to a deeper understanding of this complex interdisciplinary subject.

Phonetics as a science of speech should not be geared toward any particular language. Nonetheless, many examples in this textbook are from English, simply because this book is written in English. We do, however, include examples from a variety of languages to illustrate facts not found in English, but in-depth knowledge of those languages by the reader is not required.