The relationship between diachronic change and synchronic variation at the articulatory, auditory, acoustic and social level is one of the greatest puzzles in the study of language. Even though plentiful examples exist to suggest that dynamics of synchronic variation and diachronic change are tightly interconnected, a unified theory to account for language change in its relationship to all layers of synchronic variation remains a desideratum. This volume compiles new evidence from articulatory, acoustic, auditory, sociolinguistic, and phonological analyses of segmental and prosodic data and computational modelling, and offers a refreshing theoretical angle on the ongoing debates in language change. The volume is divided into three sections, each focusing on one aspect of speech dynamics – the historical, the emerging and the theoretical, each making a step toward a unified view of speech dynamics at the interface of synchronic variation and diachronic change. The large range of methodologies and theories represented in this book will appeal to scholars from a variety of linguistic fields with an interest in speech dynamics, including phoneticians, phonologists, sociolinguists, typologists, computational and historical linguists.
Speech dynamics refer to the temporal characteristics in all stages of the human speech communication process. This speech “chain” starts with the formation of a linguistic message in a speaker's brain and ends with the arrival of the message in a listener's brain. Given the intricacy of the dynamic speech process and its fundamental importance in human communication, this monograph is intended to provide a comprehensive material on mathematical models of speech dynamics and to address the following issues: How do we make sense of the complex speech process in terms of its functional role of speech communication? How do we quantify the special role of speech timing? How do the dynamics relate to the variability of speech that has often been said to seriously hamper automatic speech recognition? How do we put the dynamic process of speech into a quantitative form to enable detailed analyses? And finally, how can we incorporate the knowledge of speech dynamics into computerized speech analysis and recognition algorithms? The answers to all these questions require building and applying computational models for the dynamic speech process. What are the compelling reasons for carrying out dynamic speech modeling? We provide the answer in two related aspects. First, scientific inquiry into the human speech code has been relentlessly pursued for several decades. As an essential carrier of human intelligence and knowledge, speech is the most natural form of human communication. Embedded in the speech code are linguistic (as well as para-linguistic) messages, which are conveyed through four levels of the speech chain. Underlying the robust encoding and transmission of the linguistic messages are the speech dynamics at all the four levels. Mathematical modeling of speech dynamics provides an effective tool in the scientific methods of studying the speech chain. Such scientific studies help understand why humans speak as they do and how humans exploit redundancy and variability by way of multitiered dynamic processes to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of human speech communication. Second, advancement of human language technology, especially that in automatic recognition of natural-style human speech is also expected to benefit from comprehensive computational modeling of speech dynamics. The limitations of current speech recognition technology are serious and are well known. A commonly acknowledged and frequently discussed weakness of the statistical model underlying current speech recognition technology is the lack of adequate dynamic modeling schemes to provide correlation structure across the temporal speech observation sequence. Unfortunately, due to a variety of reasons, the majority of current research activities in this area favor only incremental modifications and improvements to the existing HMM-based state-of-the-art. For example, while the dynamic and correlation modeling is known to be an important topic, most of the systems nevertheless employ only an ultra-weak form of speech dynamics; e.g., differential or delta parameters. Strong-form dynamic speech modeling, which is the focus of this monograph, may serve as an ultimate solution to this problem. After the introduction chapter, the main body of this monograph consists of four chapters. They cover various aspects of theory, algorithms, and applications of dynamic speech models, and provide a comprehensive survey of the research work in this area spanning over past 20~years. This monograph is intended as advanced materials of speech and signal processing for graudate-level teaching, for professionals and engineering practioners, as well as for seasoned researchers and engineers specialized in speech processing
The idea that speech is a dynamic process is a tautology: whether from the standpoint of the talker, the listener, or the engineer, speech is an action, a sound, or a signal continuously changing in time. Yet, because phonetics and speech science are offspring of classical phonology, speech has been viewed as a sequence of discrete events-positions of the articulatory apparatus, waveform segments, and phonemes. Although this perspective has been mockingly referred to as "beads on a string", from the time of Henry Sweet's 19th century treatise almost up to our days specialists of speech science and speech technology have continued to conceptualize the speech signal as a sequence of static states interleaved with transitional elements reflecting the quasi-continuous nature of vocal production. This book, a collection of papers of which each looks at speech as a dynamic process and highlights one of its particularities, is dedicated to the memory of Ludmilla Andreevna Chistovich. At the outset, it was planned to be a Chistovich festschrift but, sadly, she passed away a few months before the book went to press. The 24 chapters of this volume testify to the enormous influence that she and her colleagues have had over the four decades since the publication of their 1965 monograph.
The Myofunctional Evaluation provides a logical and well-organized sequence to follow for evaluating tongue thrust clients. It covers the oral resting posture, respiration, oral hard and soft tissue, and habits.
Sad, but true, some children remain in speech therapy longer than they should. Even when the child can say his "new sound", he fails to progress into the conversation level, i.e., he neglects to "carryover." It's frustrating for everyone. So what can be done? Well, there is a little-known, highly effective speech solution that's easy to integrate into treatment. It centers on what the tongue is doing--when it's doing nothing! How can this be helpful? Because of one critical principle: where the tongue rests is where it speaks. When the tongue learns to rest on top in the speech zone, it can easily reach all speech sounds. But when the tongue rests "low", for example, speech sounds are frequently distorted. Many times the speech result is a "lisp." Written by a well-known, experienced speech therapist, The Key to Carryover is an easy-to-teach action plan that provides full analysis, interpretation, and step-by-step therapy that instills the new resting postures for consistent and correct speech production.
Swalloworks provides fundamental information about orofacial myology, and outlines a myo-functional program to remediate the tongue thrust swallow and harmful oral resting posture.
Speech: A dynamic process takes readers on a rigorous exploratory journey to expose them to the inherently dynamic nature of speech. The book addresses an intriguing question: Based only on physical principles alone, can the exploitation of a simple acoustic tube evolve into an optimal speech production system comparable to the one we possess? In the work presented, the tube is deformed step by step with the sole criterion of expending minimum effort to obtain maximum acoustic variations. At the end of this process, the tube is found divided into distinctive regions and an acoustic space emerges capable of generating speech sounds. Attaching this tube to a model, an inherently dynamic and efficient system is created. In the resulting system, optimal primitive trajectories are seen to naturally exist in the acoustic space and the regions defined in the tube correspond to the main places of articulation for oral vowels and plosive consonants. All this implies that these speech sounds are inherent properties of not only the modeled acoustic tube but also of the human speech production system. This book stands as a valuable resource for accomplished and aspiring speech scientists as well as for other interested persons in search for an introduction to speech acoustics that takes an unconventional path.
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.
