The importance of an individual's voice in everyday social interaction can scarcely be overestimated. It is an essential element in the listener's analysis of the speaker's physical, psychological and social characteristics. Differences in voice quality reflect different habitual adjustments, or settings, of the vocal apparatus. Individual consonant and vowel segments can be thought of as momentary actions superimposed on these settings and voice quality, as the characteristic sound of a speaker's voice, thus pervades and to a certain extent determines the phonetic character of these linguistic segments. This volume sets out a phonetic description of voice quality, which has largely been neglected in other studies. Dr Laver's integrative approach is a major advance in general phonetic theory and his standardisation of descriptive terminology for the voice will be welcomed by those working in the fields of speech therapy, speech pathology, social psychology and communications engineering, as well as by students and specialists in speech science, phonetics and phonology.
