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Vowels and Consonants, 3rd Edition

ISBN: 978-1-444-33429-6

February 2012

Wiley-Blackwell

240 pages

Description
This popular and accessible introduction to phonetics has been fully updated for its third edition, and now includes an accompanying website with sound files, and expanded coverage of topics such as speech technology.
  • Describes how languages use a variety of different sounds, many of them quite unlike any that occur in well-known languages
  • Written by the late Peter Ladefoged, one of the world's leading phoneticians, with updates by renowned forensic linguist, Sandra Ferrari Disner
  • Includes numerous revisions to the discussion of speech technology and additional updates throughout the book
  • Explores the acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual components of speech, demonstrates speech synthesis, and explains how speech recognition systems work
  • Supported by an accompanying website at www.vowelsandconsonants3e.com featuring additional data and recordings of the sounds of a wide variety of languages, to reinforce learning and bring the descriptions to life
About the Author
Peter Ladefoged (1925-2006) was Research Phonetician and Professor of Phonetics Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was Director of the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory from 1962 to 1991 and was president of the Linguistic Society of America. He is the author of numerous books, including The Sounds of the World's Languages (with I. Maddieson, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), Phonetic Data Analysis (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), and A Course in Phonetics, Sixth Edition (with Keith Johnson, 2010).

Sandra Ferrari Disner teaches general and forensic linguistics at the University of Southern California. She has over 25 years of experience in speech technology, having developed commercial text-to-speech and speech-recognition systems in five languages, as well as the world's first talking video games.

Features
  • Introduces phonetics in an accessible manner
  • Written by Peter Ladefoged, one of the world’s leading phoneticians, with updates by renowned forensic linguist Sandra Ferrari Disner
  • Outlines the acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual components of speech, demonstrates speech synthesis, and explains how speech recognition systems work
  • Includes descriptions of the sounds of a wide variety of languages that are introduced on the accompanying website
  • Third edition includes numerous revisions to the discussion of speech technology and additional updates throughout the book