Sally Smith is reluctant to speak to her classmates and teachers, but as days go by she develops the courage to become a brave speaker. This Teach to Speech book helps guide children who are reluctant speakers or selectively mute to become bold, brave and resilient, like Sally in this story.

This book provides a broad and comprehensive overview of the existing technical approaches in the area of silent speech interfaces (SSI), both in theory and in application. Each technique is described in the context of the human speech production process, allowing the reader to clearly understand the principles behind SSI in general and across different methods. Additionally, the book explores the combined use of different data sources, collected from various sensors, in order to tackle the limitations of simpler SSI approaches, addressing current challenges of this field. The book also provides information about existing SSI applications, resources and a simple tutorial on how to build an SSI.

This book concerns itself with the origin of speech and language, takes the reader through the steps of dialectic (how to reason) and rhetoric (how to persuade), examines the importance of stories and symbols and the role of thinking, and highlights the necessity of silence and the practice of meditation. Though it is written from a philosophical perspective, it is eminently practical, with guidelines, exercises, ancient advice, and concrete suggestions on how to communicate, convince, and commune with one’s self. Dr. Costello draws on both Eastern and Western thought to show the power, poetry, and potential of words. It explores the following: how to question (Socrates and Plato); how to argue (Aristotle and Cicero); how to be right (Schopenhauer); how to think (Heidegger); how to spot your speaking style (the enneagram); how to communicate compassionately (Thich Nhat Hanh); how to meditate and stay silent (various contemplative traditions).

What would you go through as a parent to give your child the power of speech? Parents dream their children will achieve many great things, but most parents do not dream their children will struggle for years just to speak what is in their hearts and minds. Kathy Hennessy faced this challenge with not one but both of her children when they were diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech. What does a child feel like when no one in the world understands what she is trying to say? Imagine the frustration when even your mom doesn t get it. Young Kate Hennessy understands all too well those feelings of exasperation and defeat. In this forthright and emotional story, Kathy tells of the mountains they climbed just for her children to have a chance at speech. Hennessy tells of the battles she waged with insurance companies, pediatricians, school systems, and family, while Kate shares her own experiences and those of her brother with bullies, friends, and following their dreams. Heart-breaking and heart-warming, the Hennessys tell of the intense commitment to therapy, the magic of Santa Claus, and the sadness of teaching children to defend themselves. Daughter Kate tells of the determination of her brother and herself not to be consumed or broken by their disability; Kathy shares her creative solutions to their early speech limitations and her pride in seeing them as young adults speak in public at national conferences on childhood apraxia of speech. Not only had they conquered their own challenges, they were leading the way for other children like them.

In his televised and widely watched speech to the nation on November 3, 1969, Pres. Richard M. Nixon introduced a phrase—“silent majority”—and a policy—Vietnamization of the war effort—that echo down to the present day. Nixon’s appearance on this night framed the terms in which much of the subsequent civil conflict and military strategy would be understood. Rhetorical scholar Karlyn Kohrs Campbell analyzes this critically important speech in light of the historical context and its centrality to three other speeches–two earlier and one the following spring, when the announcement of the US invasion of Cambodia brought a far different response. She also sheds light on a discourse that generated much heat in a nation already seriously divided in its support of the war in Vietnam. The first single volume dedicated to this speech, this addition to the distinguished Library of Presidential Rhetoric provides the speech text, a summary of its context, its rhetorical elements, and the disciplinary analyses that have developed.

Spoken language communication is arguably the most important activity that distinguishes humans from nonhuman species. While many animal species communicate and exchange information using sound, humans are unique in the complexity of the information that can be conveyed using speech, and in the range of ideas, thoughts and emotions that can be expressed. Despite the importance of speech communication for the entire structure of human society, there are many aspects of this process that are not fully understood. One problem is that research on speech and language is typically carried out by different groups of scientists working on separate aspects of the underlying functional and neural systems. On the one hand, research from an auditory perspective focuses on the acoustical properties of speech sounds, their representation in the auditory system, and how that representation is used to extract phonetic information. On the other hand, research from psycholinguistic perspectives examines the processes by which representations of meaning are extracted from the acoustic-phonetic sequence, and how these are linked to the construction of higher-level linguistic interpretation in terms of sentences and discourse. Till now, there has been relatively little interaction between speech researchers from these two groups, in spite of a dramatic expansion in recent years of research into the neural bases of auditory and linguistic functions. This book bridges the gap between these two lines of research, recognising that both have the same aims in understanding how the motor gestures of a speaker are transformed to sounds and how those are mapped onto meaning in the comprehension of spoken language. It presents the work of leading researchers specializing in a wide range of topics within speech perception and language processing - along with contributions from key researchers in neuroanatomy and neuro-imaging. This important new work cuts through the traditional boundaries and fosters crossdisciplinary interactions in this important and rapidly developing area of the biological and cognitive sciences.

This book addresses different aspects of the research field and a wide range of topics in speech signal processing, speech recognition and language processing. The chapters are divided in three different sections: Speech Signal Modeling, Speech Recognition and Applications. The chapters in the first section cover some essential topics in speech signal processing used for building speech recognition as well as for speech synthesis systems: speech feature enhancement, speech feature vector dimensionality reduction, segmentation of speech frames into phonetic segments. The chapters of the second part cover speech recognition methods and techniques used to read speech from various speech databases and broadcast news recognition for English and non-English languages. The third section of the book presents various speech technology applications used for body conducted speech recognition, hearing impairment, multimodal interfaces and facial expression recognition.