A Field Manual of Acoustic Phonetics

Baart, Joan L. G

This book provides a practical and easy-to-understand introduction to acoustic speech analysis, primarily aimed at those involved in linguistic analysis and description in the field and at those preparing for such fieldwork. It explains commonly used methods for displaying aspects of a speech wave, such as waveform graphs, spectra, spectrograms, fundamental frequency graphs (pitch graphs), and intensity graphs. It illustrates how the results of acoustic analysis can be interpreted and used to improve the objectivity, accuracy and precision of phonetic descriptions of speech sounds. The book assumes basic knowledge of articulatory phonetics. It can be used to teach introductory courses in acoustic phonetics at the undergraduate level.

About the Author

Joan Baart studied Slavic languages and general linguistics at Leiden University, The Netherlands, where he obtained his Ph.D. under the well-known Dutch phonetician S. G. Nooteboom. In 1987 he was appointed as assistant professor of computational linguistics, still at Leiden. Joan and his wife Esther joined SIL in 1990. Between 1991 and 2004, they served with SIL in Pakistan, where Joan carried out linguistic fieldwork on several of the lesser-known Pakistani languages. Joan is currently the academic director of the West Eurasia Group of SIL; he is also an international linguistics consultant in SIL.

Table of Contents:

  1. Introduction
  2. 1.1 What is acoustic phonetics? 1.2 Benefits of acoustic phonetics for linguistic fieldwork 1.3 Acoustic phonetics and linguistic analysis 1.4 The problem of interpreting acoustic data 1.5 Overview of the following chapters

  3. Speech Waves
  4. 2.1 Sound waves: Time and amplitude
    2.1.1 What is sound?
    2.1.2 Waveforms

    2.2 Four basic types of speech wave
    2.2.1 Silence
    2.2.2 Burst
    2.2.3 Random wave
    2.2.4 Periodic wave

    2.3 Recognizing major types of speech sounds
    2.3.1 Vowels
    2.3.2 Voiceless plosives
    2.3.3 Voiced plosives

    2.4 Determining segment boundaries

  5. Sound Spectrograms and Spectra
  6. 3.1 Sound spectrograms: Time, frequency, and intensity
    3.1.1 Sine waves and complex waves
    3.1.2 Spectral analysis
    3.1.3 Broad-band and narrow-band spectrograms
    3.1.4 Spectra

    3.2 Basic acoustic properties of speech signals
    3.2.1 Overall gap
    3.2.2 Continuous energy
    3.2.3 Periodicity
    3.2.4 Harmonic structure
    3.2.5 Formants
    3.2.6 Anti-formants

    3.3 Acoustic features of some speech sounds
    3.3.1 Vowels
    3.3.2 Fricatives and plosives
    3.3.3 Static versus dynamic features

    3.4 Further reading

  7. Voice and Aspiration
  8. 4.1 Studying phonation types
    4.1.1 Inverse filtering
    4.1.2 Studying the output speech signal
    4.2 Voiced, voiceless, and aspirated plosives
    4.2.1 Acoustic features correlating with the voiced-voiceless distinction
    4.2.2 Voice onset time (VOT)

  9. Prosody
  10. 5.1 Introduction
    5.1.1 Prosody
    5.1.2 Phonetic domains of prosody

    5.2 Fundamental frequency (F0)
    5.2.1 Extracting fundamental frequency
    5.2.2 Interpreting F0 graphs

    5.3 Duration and intensity
    5.3.1 Duration
    5.3.2 Intensity

    5.4 Analyzing prosody
    5.4.1 Accent
    5.4.2 Tone
    5.4.3 Intonation


Retail Price:
vi, 127
Field manuals
Acoustic phonetics
ISBN 13:
ISBN 10:
6 × 9 × 0.28 in
0.5 lb
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