The last 50 years have witnessed a rapid growth in the understanding of the articulation and the acoustics of vowels. Contemporary theories of speech perception have concentrated on consonant perception, and this volume is intended as a balance to such bias. The authors propose a computational theory of auditory vowel perception, accounting for vowel identification in the face of acoustic differences between speakers and speaking rate and stress. This work lays the foundation for future experimental and computational studies of vowel perception.

This book presents a new model of vowel perception and production derived from visual cues identified in waveform displays. In addition to describing waveform displays of vowels beyond previous descriptions, included in the book are descriptions of experimental evidence supporting near 100% vowel identification accuracy across 20 male talkers using the concepts in the model. The book content will be of interest to several academic fields including Cognitive Science, Psychology, Linguistics, Speech and Hearing, Language Acquisition, Neurolinguistics, Phonetics, and areas within Physics and Mathematics. Beyond these academic fields, the new model of vowel perception presented here could possibly be used to improve accuracy and speed within existing speech recognition systems, or it could be used to generate a new speech recognition program. Many speech recognition programs are based on simple statistical programs like Hidden Markov Models that ignore any theoretical basis to speech recognition. The Waveform Model differs from the HMM approaches since it has a theoretical basis rooted in articulation and that has potentially more promise than these simple HMM models that just take overall similarities in waveforms and try to match them to phonemes and words. Furthermore, many of the speech recognition programs use extensive training by a single user (in quiet conditions) in order to attain over 90% accuracy, which is still a relatively poor performance. The Waveform Model requires no training, can be used across talkers, and has accuracy above reported speech recognition performance (specific to vowels). In summary, the Waveform Model is innovative, and new to the literature and research communities.

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.

Including contributions from a team of world-renowned international scholars, this volume is a state-of-the-art survey of second language speech research, showcasing new empirical studies alongside critical reviews of existing influential speech learning models. It presents a revised version of Flege's Speech Learning Model (SLM-r) for the first time, an update on a cornerstone of second language research. Chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: theoretical progress, segmental acquisition, acquiring suprasegmental features, accentedness and acoustic features, and cognitive and psychological variables. Every chapter provides new empirical evidence, offering new insights as well as challenges on aspects of the second language speech acquisition process. Comprehensive in its coverage, this book summarises the state of current research in second language phonology, and aims to shape and inspire future research in the field. It is an essential resource for academic researchers and students of second language acquisition, applied linguistics and phonetics and phonology.

Through several reviews and original work, the book focuses on three key topics: 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.

It seems as if the fundamentals of how we produce vowels and how they are acoustically represented have been clarified: we phonate and articulate. Using our vocal chords, we produce a vocal sound or noise which is then shaped into a specific vowel sound by the resonances of the pharyngeal, oral, and nasal cavities, that is, the vocal tract. Accordingly, the acoustic description of vowels relates to vowelspecific patterns of relative energy maxima in the sound spectra, known as patterns of formants. The intellectual and empirical reasoning presented in this treatise, however, gives rise to scepticism with respect to this understanding of the sound of the vowel. The reflections and materials presented provide reason to argue that, up to now, a comprehensible theory of the acoustics of the voice and of voiced speech sounds is lacking, and consequently, no satisfying understanding of vowels as an achievement and particular formal accomplishment of the voice exists. Thus, the question of the acoustics of the vowel - and with it the question of the acoustics of the voice itself - proves to be an unresolved fundamental problem.