Offers a new model of vocal tract articulation that explains laryngeal and oral voice quality, both auditorily and visually, through language examples and familiar voices.

Oller constructs a new infrastructural model of vocal communication systems that permits provocative reconceptualizations of the ways infant vocalizations progress systematically toward speech, insightful comparaisons between..

Child Phonology, Volume 1: Production contains the proceedings of a conference on child phonology held at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 28-31, 1978. The conference provided a forum for discussing theoretical and methodological issues concerning child phonology, with emphasis on speech production and perception as well as the relationship between the two. Different perspectives on how children acquire the phonology of their language(s) are considered. Comprised of 13 chapters, this volume begins with an overview of speech production in children, followed by a discussion on the control of speech production by adults. The reader is then introduced to a philosophical consideration of the theory of child phonology; the development of auditory and articulatory phonological processes in children; and stages of speech development in the first year of life. Subsequent chapters focus on the emergence of the sounds of speech in infancy; a cross-linguistic perspective on the acquisition of stop systems; and the acquisition of word-initial fricatives and affricates in English by children aged 2-6 years. The book also explores the role of context in misarticulations before concluding with an analysis of the acquisition of tone. This monograph will be of interest to phonologists and linguists.

This book presents a current, interdisciplinary perspective on language requisites from both a biological/comparative perspective and from a developmental/learning perspective. Perspectives regarding language and language acquisition are advanced by scientists of various backgrounds -- speech, hearing, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and language intervention. This unique volume searches for a rational interface between findings and perspectives generated by language studies with humans and with chimpanzees. Intended to render a reconsideration as to the essence of language and the requisites to its acquisition, it also provides readers with perspectives defined by various revisionists who hold that language might be other than the consequence of a mutation unique to humans and might, fundamentally, not be limited to speech.

A compilation of the proceedings of a conference held to honor Alvin M. Liberman for his outstanding contributions to research in speech perception, this volume deals with two closely related and controversial proposals for which Liberman and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories have argued forcefully over the past 35 years. The first is that articulatory gestures are the units not only of speech production but also of speech perception; the second is that speech production and perception are not cognitive processes, but rather functions of a special mechanism. This book explores the implications of these proposals not only for speech production and speech perception, but for the neurophysiology of language, language acquisition, higher-level linguistic processing, the visual perception of phonetic gestures, the production and perception of sign language, the reading process, and learning to read. The contributors to this volume include linguists, psycholinguists, speech scientists, neurophysiologists, and ethologists. Liberman himself responds in the final chapter.

This book presents a general overview of our current knowledge of language development in children. All the principal strands of language development are covered, including phonological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic development; bilingualism; precursors to language development in infancy; and the language development of children with developmental disabilities, including children with specific language impairment. Written by leading international authorities, each chapter summarises clearly and lucidly our current state of knowledge, and carefully explains and evaluates the theories which have been proposed to account for children's development in that area.