Dynamics of Speech Production and Perception

Description

Издательство IOS Press, 2006, -389 pp.That speech is a dynamic process strikes as 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" [3], from the time of Henry Sweet's 19th century treatise [5] 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. After all, there must be static, stable elements internally if listeners can perceive and label individual phonemes in the speech stream. While this discrete representation-static targets reached during production and recovered during perception- may describe, at best, clearly pronounced "hyper" speech in which departures from the canonical are rare, it badly fails to characterize spoken language where such departures constitute the norm. A good example for the inadequacy of phonemic representation is a recent analysis of 45 minutes of spontaneous conversational speech in which 73 different forms of the word "and" were seen, and yet all of them were unambiguously identified by listeners [2]. Obviously, we need to part with the phoneme as the basic unit of speech if we want to study verbal communication. Fortunately, an alternative approach was developed in the latter half of the twentieth century by a team of scientists at the Pavlov Institute of Physiology in St. Petersburg, the then-Leningrad. Headed by Ludmilla Chistovich and her husband Valeriy Kozhevnikov, two great pioneers of speech research, this remarkable team recognized that even in clear speech the phoneme could not be considered without the context in which it appeared. In their view, the phoneme was an epiphenomenon, derived from the more basic unit of the syllable [1]. In this, as in so many aspects of speech models, the so-called "Leningrad group" was far ahead of its time. In the groundbreaking volume "Speech: Articulation and Perception," [4] this group introduced the concept of dynamic systems to speech research-as early as in the mid-1960s. For decades, their research was considered more of an exotic curiosity than serious work because of its unusual and distinctive nature. Most speech scientists outside of the Soviet bloc did not know what to make of physical concepts such as dynamics because they lay outside the traditional realm of research. But Chistovich and Kozhevnikov understood that dynamics and the phoneme did not mesh. Looking back from the year 2006, it's easy to forget how radical the Leningrad group's perspective was at the time of its inception in the 1960s. Nowadays, dynamics-linear and nonlinear-is all the rage in many scientific fields, and the syllable is no longer controversial. This book, a collection of papers each of which 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 book is divided into five sections, each examining the dynamics of speech from one particular perspective.Production Dynamics of Speech Production Dynamics of Speech Dynamic Specification in the Production of Speech and Sign Controlled Variables, the Uncontrolled Manifold Method, and the Task-Dynamic Model of Speech Production The Achievement of Somatosensory Targets as an Independent Goal of Speech Production – Special Status of Vowel-to-Vowel Transitions Respiratory System Pressures at the Start of an Utterance Speech Gestures by Deduction, Gesture Production and Gesture Perception Speech Dynamics: Acoustic Manifestations and Perceptual Consequences Perceptual Dynamics of Speech Perceptual Dynamics of Speech Auditory Perception and Processing of Amplitude Modulation in Speech-Like Signals: Legacy of the Chistovich-Kozhevnikov Group Dynamic Center-of-Gravity Effects in Consonant-Vowel Transitions Multi-Resolution Analysis in Speech Perception Speech Dynamics and the Cocktail-Party Effect Fluctuations in Amplitude and Frequency Enable Interaural Delays to Foster the Identification of Speech-Like Stimuli Vowel Normalisation: Time-Domain Processing of the Internal Dynamics of Speech The Role of Temporal Dynamics in Understanding Spoken Language Using Dynamics in Speech Applications Using Dynamics in Speech Applications Modulation Frequency Filtering of Speech Data-Driven Extraction of Temporal Features from Speech Back to Speech Science – Towards a Collaborative ASR Community of the Century Automatic Phonetic Transcription and Its Application in Speech Recogniser Training – A Case Study for Hungarian Speech Inversion: Problems and Solutions Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Teaching and Training Methods Based on the Dynamic Spectro-Temporal Characteristics of Speech Dynamics of the Singing Voice Dynamics of the Singing Voice The Extent to Which Changes in Amplitude Envelope Can Carry Information for Perception of Vocal Sound Without the Fundamental Frequency or Formant Peaks Quantity Oppositions in Spoken Estonian and Their Transformation in Folksongs Speech Processing and the Auditory Cortex Speech Processing and the Auditory Cortex Analysis of Speech Dynamics in the Auditory System High-Level and Low-Level Processing in the Auditory System: The Role of Primary Auditory Cortex Definition of Human Auditory Cortex Territories Based on Anatomical Landmarks and fMRI Activation