Speech Production and Perception – serie

What do we do when we are about to utter speech? On which linguistic units do we rely? How do these units evolve from childhood to adulthood, or across time for a given language? How do we assemble these units under the influences of syntactic, phonological and prosodic rules? Do we plan the whole sequence at once? Do we plan the movements of the tongue, jaw, and lips underlying speech in the same way that we plan other movements? What tools have scientists developed to investigate these questions using observation of articulatory and acoustic signals? This book addresses these issues in eight chapters. Written by specialists in the field, these chapters provide the readers with a large overview of the literature, and illustrate the research challenges using selected examples of experimental studies.

When we speak we do not articulate each sound one after the other like beads on a string. Instead, the movements of our articulators, such as the tongue and lips, overlap. These movements are coordinated in complex ways to produce syllables, words and phrases. This book is concerned with syllables. What is a syllable? There is general consensus that «sa», «pa» and «ra» are syllables. But what about «spa» or «spra»? The answer to this question is sought using a method investigating the coordination of tongue and lip movements. The results shed light on a long standing problem for syllable phonology in Italian, namely the syllabification of «s» when it occurs in a consonant cluster such as «sp» in «sport».

Inter-individual variation in speech is a topic of increasing interest both in human sciences and speech technology. It can yield important insights into biological, cognitive, communicative, and social aspects of language. Written by specialists in psycholinguistics, phonetics, speech development, speech perception and speech technology, this volume presents experimental and modeling studies that provide the reader with a deep understanding of interspeaker variability and its role in speech processing, speech development, and interspeaker interactions. It discusses how theoretical models take into account individual behavior, explains why interspeaker variability enriches speech communication, and summarizes the limitations of the use of speaker information in forensics.

Learning and memory processes are basic features of human existence. They allow us to (un)consciously adapt to changes in our social and physical environment in a variety of ways and may have been a precursor for survival in human evolution. Through several reviews and original work the book focuses on three key topics that enhanced our understanding of the topic in the last twenty years: first, the role of real-time auditory feedback in learning, second, the role of motor aspects for learning and memory, and third, representations in memory and the role of sleep on memory consolidation. The electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org

This book proposes a detailed picture of the continuities and ruptures between communication in primates and language in humans. It explores a diversity of perspectives on the origins of language, including a fine description of vocal communication in animals, mainly in monkeys and apes, but also in birds, the study of vocal tract anatomy and cortical control of the vocal productions in monkeys and apes, the description of combinatory structures and their social and communicative value, and the exploration of the cognitive environment in which language may have emerged from nonhuman primate vocal or gestural communication.

This book combines theoretical and experimental approaches to provide a comprehensive account of glottalization in word-final syllables in Italian. The speech production study at the heart of the book sheds light on the source of glottalization, the contextual factors determining its occurrence, and the acoustic correlates which characterize its production.Acoustic analysis of words presenting evidence of glottalization is carried out through visual inspection of the acoustic signal together with spectral analysis of voice quality. Statistical analysis of the data in the study is performed using mixed effects models, as well as tree-based methods including conditional inference trees and random forests. Results of the study have implications for cross-linguistic studies on voice quality.