The following is an annotated list of works for further reading in phonetics. They're in order of progressive interest, according to my own subjective judgment.
General
works
1. Ladefoged, Peter. 2001. Vowels and Consonants:
An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. Paper. 191pp.
+ CD-ROM.
An engaging and accessible introduction to phonetics. It's supposedly for
non-specialists, but it has considerably more information on acoustic phonetics
than his A Course in Phonetics. Comes with an excellent CD of examples
in this book and in the Course. Not in the library yet. Available at Crane's
http://www.crane.com.tw/. A very worthwhile
investment.
2. Catford, J. C. 1988. A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Paper. P221 C33 1988
Used by Prof. Chang Yu-hong in his Practical Phonetics class. Excellent for learning each of the IPA sounds (plus some that go off the chart) in a systematic way. Lots of effective 'tricks' on how to produce the sounds and performance exercises. Available at Cranes and the library.
3. Smalley, William A. 1961; 1980. A Manual of Articulatory
Phonetics. Pasadena: William Carey Library. 512pp. Paper. P221 S55
Although this book is out of print, many copies
are available in the library, and you can often get it secondhand. It originally
came with reel-to-reel tapes or cassettes of the sounds and exercises presented
in the book. NTU doesn't have these, but the recordings are now being copied onto
CD-ROM for the library. There are a number of odd things about the book, besides
its age. First, it uses outdated phonetic symbols; you need to figure out which
standard IPA symbols each of Smalley's symbols corresponds to, and get used to
using them. And this book was apparently printed from typewritten copy,
though it is mostly quite clear. A number of entertaining cartoons drawn in a
very distinctive 'loopy' style are scattered throughout the book. This book covers
almost all the sounds (and perhaps more) taught in Ladefoged's Course,
introducing each one clearly, then offering many chances for oral and listening
practice. It takes examples from familiar European languages like English and
French, relatively close-to-home ones like Southern Min and Vietnamese, and some
really exotic ones like Kpelle (African) and Maidu (Amerindian). It seems no other
book has come along to replace this one in its breadth, rigor and rich abundance
of exercises. Worth working through if you are serious about phonetics, especially
field work. Someone should put together a new book like this soon, or update and
re-release this one.
4. Anita C. Bickford, Rick
Floyd. 1981; 2003. Tools
for Analyzing the World's Languages: Articulatory Phonetics. 3rd ed. Dallas:
SIL International. 223pp. Paper.
This book
is probably the best currently available response to the suggestion in the preceding
entry, i.e. to update and resissue Smalley's Manual. Don't expect to find
too much in this book that's new if you've gone through Ladefoged's Course,
and it has nowhere near the amount of practice exercises that Smalley has. What
this book is good for is consolidating what you've learned in Introduction to
Phonetics; it also provides some good transcription practice with real (rather
than made-up) examples from real languages, and lots of good addtional "tricks"
to help you learn and practice unfamiliar sounds. This book introduces the "Americanist"
system used in Smalley parallel to the current standard IPA symbols. The chapters
are short and easy to digest. Two criticisms: (1) there is no accompanying CD
available with this book; and (2) there are lots of notes at the bottoms of the
pages, which I find interrupt the flow of the chapters a bit, and they're set
in very tiny print. See also LINGUIST
review. I strongly agree with reviewer Peter Unseth's comment: "In the
abstract, I presume that the sounds could be taught equally well using nonsense
words designed to highlight the sounds taught in each lesson, but I feel my students
respond better to data that is collected from real languages." Not yet available
in the NTU library; why not put in a request?
5. 王士元 Wang,
William S. Y. 1988. 語言與語音
Language and Phonetics [in Chinese]. 台北 Taipei: 文鶴 Crane's 167pp.
Paper. 801.1
1041
This book is by a highly renowned and extremely productive Chinese linguist
at UC Berkeley, William S.Y. Wang. It is an eclectic collection of material based
mostly on a course in phonetics he gave in Beijing some years ago. Four big advantages
of this book: (1) it covers a very wide range of material, some outside of the
field of phonetics; (2) it treats acoustic phonetics in considerable depth; (3)
it gives you the Chinese translations of many of the technical terms used in acoustic
phonetics; (4) it's inexpensive and easily obtainable at Crane's and the library.
A big disadvantage: it's full of errors and typos, and many of the tables
and figures it refers to are nowhere to be found in the book. You can use this
opportunity as a test to see if you can catch and correct the errors yourself.
The errors don't cancel out the usefulness of this little book; just be extra
attentive when you read it.
6. Laver, John. 1994. Principles
of Phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 707pp. Paper. P221 L293
1994
This is an impeccably written, well-organized
and comprehensive overview of phonetics. It's meant for beginners, but I think
it more suitable for people with some background in phonetics. The style is academic
and not as lively as Ladefoged's books, but very good, and it includes things
not found in Ladefoged or Catford, like information on pulmonic ingresssives.
Available at Crane's and the NTU library. Amazon review here.
7. Ladefoged,
Peter. 1962; 1996. Elements
of Acoustic Phonetics. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Paper. QP306
L33 1962
This book is a good, and gentle, introduction to acoustic phonetics, with
chapters on computer processing of speech. Fairly recently updated. Available
at the library.
8. Ladefoged, Peter. 2003. Phonetic Data Analysis:
An Introduction to Fieldwork and Instrumental Techniques. Oxford: Blackwell.
193pp. Paper.
This is Prof. Ladefoged's
newest book. In it he discusses the very practical issues of doing fieldwork and
speech analysis: finding and paying informants; how to elicit, record, and organize
your data; pitch, length, and loudness; how to make good spectrograms; spectrographic
analysis of vowels and consonants; There are boxes throughout filled with Prof.
Ladefoged's personal experiences while doing fieldwork in places like Namibia
and Brazil - these are really fun to read! I appreciate Prof. Ladefoged's admissions
of where he didn't always do everything perfectly and that he hasn't always been
right. This helps one feel a little more relaxed about one's own efforts, and
also encourages a healthy honesty about our work. As usual, Prof. Ladefoged manages
to make difficult concepts not only palatable but even enjoyable to read about
to the 'average' reader. Very highly recommended.
9.
Fry, Dennis. 1979. The Physics of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. QP306
F8 1979 and
QP306
F945 1979
This book on acoustic phonetics is short, clear, and quite thorough. The only problem is that some of the information is at odds with other sources, e.g. the definition of 'intensity'. Available at the library and Crane's.
10. Johnson, Keith. 1997. Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics. Oxford:
Blackwell. 169pp. P221.5
J64 1997
A great follow-up to 6; treats some newer developments. Used as a text in Prof. Chiang Wen-yu's graduate experimental phonetics class. Very popular – deservedly so – in the field for the past several years. A new edition has just come out. Available at the library.
11. Denes, Peter and Elliot Pinson. 1993. The Speech Chain: The Physics
and Biology of Spoken Language. 2nd edition. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.
QP306
D413
A standard and widely-used introduction to acoustic phonetics. Accessible.
In the library.
12. 9. Rosen, Stuart and Peter Howell. 1991. Signals
and systems for speech and hearing. London; San Diego:Academic Press. 322pp.
QP461 R66 1991
If you read this one, do
it somewhere between the first and third book you read on acoustic phonetics.
If you read it too early, you probably won't get what is meant by 'systems' in
this context, or what they're good for; if you read it too late, you will have
already covered most of the material in this book elsewhere. This book is reader-friendly,
and contains lots of good information on the processing of speech signals, e.g.
filtering, the making of spectra and spectrograms, and digitalization. This book
offers greater coverage of 'phase' than most books of its kind. Available in NTU
library.
13. Bartholomew, Wilmer T. 1942. Acoustics of Music. Westport: Greenwood
Press. 242pp. ML3805.B29
A2
On music rather than speech sounds, and it's quite old, but it offers a
very good and digestible foundation in acoustics. In the library.
14. Jeans, Sir James. 1937; 1968. Science and Music. Dover reprint of original
Cambridge University Press edition. New York: Dover. 258pp. Paper. ML3805 J346
Also old, so some of the material is outdated,
e.g. on the ear and hearing. And it covers some of the same material as 10. But
it is rigorous and informative, and a good review of acoustics mainly as applied
to music. Available in the physics reading room.
15. Clark, John & Colin Yallop. 1990. An Introduction to Phonetics
and Phonology. Oxford: Blackwell, P217
C65 1995
This is a very thorough introduction to and overview of phonetics and phonology. Available in the library and sometimes at Bookman and Crane's.
16. Ladefoged, Peter and Ian Maddieson.
1996. The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. 426
pp. Paper. P221
L24 1996
This is a comprehensive, in-depth treatment of the sounds that occur in the languages of the world, organized mainly by manner of articulation. Heavy and demanding, but if you're in this field to stay, you ought to tackle this sooner or later. The 'clicks' chapter especially is quite taxing to work through, but correspondingly you'll get lots out of it. Available at the library.
17. Pullam, Geoffrey & William Ladusaw.
1986. Phonetic Symbol Guide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paper.
P221
P85 1986
A handy reference on IPA symbols, past and present. Frankly, I don't use this that often, though.
18. Ing, Roseller Ortega 吳國賢. 1997. The
Teaching of English Pronunciation 英語發音教學. Taipei: Crane. 142 pp. Paper.
Interesting material on learning good English pronunciation, written from the point of view of a Taiwan learner, by a noted UK-trained, multilingual Chinese-Filipino phonetician at NTNU. Crane's.
19. Knowles, Gerald. 1987. Patterns of
Spoken English: An Introduction to English Phonetics. Londong & New York.
262 pp. Paper.
Less technical, and it uses odd phonetic symbols, but engaging – it talks about fun things like phonaesthemes, and areas treated less often in depth by other works, such as connected speech phenomena. Crane's.
20. 何大安 Ho, Tah-an. 1987. 聲韻學中的觀念和方法 Historical phonology: concepts and methods
[in Chinese]. 台北: 大安出版社 Taipei: Tah-an Publishing Co. 336
pp. Paper. 802.46
2143
A concise and clear introduction to historical Chinese phonology; material on general phonetics and linguistics as well. A good introductory book to find out just what 聲韻學 is all about. Audit a 聲韻學 in the Chinese department to learn more – Prof. 楊秀芳 (wife of the author) comes highly recommended. Try the Student Book Store 學生書局 or Lexus 樂學書局; also in the library.
21. 國音學. 國立臺灣師範大學 國音教材編輯委員會.
台北:正中書局. 1982; 1986. 627pp. Paper.
A
comprehensive history of the development of Mandarin phonetic systems in the
Republic of China; also conventional Mandarin phonetics, i.e. this book doesn't
address differences in Taiwan Mandarin from standard textbook Mandarin. In Chinese.
22. Gimson, A. C. and Alan Cruttenden. 1962; 1994; 2001. Gimson's Pronunciation
of English. 6th ed. London: Edward Arnold. (paper) ISBN: 0-340-75972-0,
xix+339pp. See LINGUIST
review of this book.
A standard work on RP phonetics with 'classic'
status; recently revised.
23. Roach, Peter. 2001. Phonetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford
Introductions to Language Study.
Click the link to read a LINGUIST
review of this book. An earlier edition is available at Crane's.
24. Reetz, Henning.
1999. Artikulatorische
und akustische Phonetik. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Pp.
200.
If you read German and like phonetics, definitely
get hold of this and read it. It's somewhat similar to Ladefoged's Elements
of Acoustic Phonetics in coverage and tone, but it includes materials not
in Elements or most other books of this type. Henning makes difficult
material extremely accessible, clear, and even fun to go through and
learn – it is easy to understand how he earned an excellent teaching award!
The first major part of the book covers sound waves, speech analysis and processing,
and acoustics; the second is on the anatomy, physiology and dynamics of the
speech and hearing organs; formants and the acoustic structure of the individual
sounds of language are also covered here. An amazing amount of information is
covered in a very small space, without seeming too dense or overwhelming. The
text abounds in apt analogies taken from everyday life which are in many cases
accompanied by clear and often charming illustrations. Ordering information
and sample pages are available via the title link above. A five-star book.
25. Hayward, Katrina. 2000. Experimental Phonetics.
Harlow, UK, New York: Longman. 298pp. QP306 H39 2000 (on the 4th floor of the
NTU library).
"Experimental phonetics" is defined
by the author as phonetic research that uses instruments to record, measure
and analyze speech events; this is contrasted to "impressionistic phonetics".
This is explained in the first chapter, which I found to be one of the more
engaging in the book. If you've read some of the works in this list, this book
will probably be over 80% review. But different presentations of familiar material
are often useful for consolidating existing knowledge. And there are new bits
here and there, like information on differing VOTs for the different stops.
Videos:
1. Measuring Speech Production. Maureen Stone. (VC) QP306 M42z 1993 Videocassettes
1-3.
A three-set collection containing demonstrations
for use in teaching courses on speech acoustics, physiology, and instrumentation.
A text booklet describing the demonstrations and bibliographies for additional
information is included. Issued in 1993.
2. Speech Perception. Patricia K. Kuhl. (VC) BF463.S64 S74z
1996
This video contains a presentation by Patricia
K. Kuhl on Speech Perception. Segments include the following: I. General Introduction
to Speech/Language Processing: Academic, Business, and Society Interest in this
Topic; Spoken Language Processing; II. Classic Issues in Speech Perception;
III. Phonetic Perception; IV. Model of Developmental Speech Perception; V. Cross-modal
Speech Perception, Links to Production; VI. Biology and Neuroscience Connections;
VII. Summary and Conclusions.
Advanced
works (particularly on acoustics, auditory
phonetics, speech
signal analysis, speech synthesis, ASR (automatic speech recognition), psychology,
and
other more technical phonetics-related topics)
1. Jurafsky, Daniel & James H. Martin. 2001. Speech and Language
Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics,
and Speech Recognition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 934 pp. Available
at 天瓏資訊圖書 Tianlong Computer Books, 107 Chungking South Road, Section 1,
Taipei; this bookstore has the most complete collection I know of in Taipei
of up-to-the-minute English-language computer books, including a good selection
of works on computational linguistics, natural language processing, and related
topics. Their prices are reasonable, considering the original publishing prices
of this kind of books in the U.S. Request a VIP card for discounts.).
A very readable one-stop resource on speech and
language processing, computational linguistics, natural language processing,
and much more. Start here if you're looking for a digestible introduction to
these fields. Visit their Web site at: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~martin/slp.html
Listed in the NTU library catalog with the note: 'order cancelled'.
2. Gold, Ben & Nelson Morgan. 2000. Speech and Audio Signal Processing:
Processing and Perception of Speech and Music. New York: John Wiley &
Sons. 537 pp.
This is an advanced and highly technical graduate-level
work for engineers, but it is very clear, informative and engaging. Found
at the Einstein Book Store, on Hsinsheng South Road across from the side gate
of NTU, 2nd floor, just above McDonald's. Available in reference or reserved
readings section of the NTU library, i.e. it can't be checked out.
3. C. J. Moore, Brian C. J. 1982; 1997. An Introduction to the Psychology
of Hearing. 3rd ed. Academic Press. 350 pp. ISBN: 0125056273 Gen. Lib. Hum/Soc Sci. 2F BF251 M66 1989
You may have to reserve this book in advance to
get it from the library. This book is not a graded introduction to human hearing,
but rather a compendium of research results in many areas of hearing, with emphasis
on very recent studies.
4. Stevens, Kenneth N. 1998. Acoustic Phonetics (Current Studies in Linguistics).
Cambridge: MA: MIT Press. 607 pp. Gen. Lib. Hum/Soc. Sci. 2F P221.5 S74 1998
The 'Big Mama' of books on acoustic phonetics.
This is basically an engineering text and is quite heavy on math.
Further advanced works;
most are available in the NTU library.
5. Perkell, Joseph S. & Dennis H. Klatt, ed. 1986.
Invariance and variability in speech processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum. 604 pp. ISBN: 0262692503 Gen. Lib. Hum/Soc. Sci. 2F P95 155 1986.
6. Warren, Richard M. 1999. Auditory Perception: A New Analysis and
Synthesis. 2nd ed. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge Univ Press. 241 pp. ISBN:
0521587832 Gen. Lib. Sci/Tech 4F QP461 W27 1999
7. J. M. Pickett. 1999. The Acoustics of Speech Communication: Fundamentals,
Speech Perception Theory, and Technology 404 pp. Allyn & Bacon; ISBN:
0205198872 Gen. Lib. Hum/Soc Sci. 2F BF463.S64 P5 1999
8. Zwicker, Eberhard, H. Fastl, H. Frater. 1974. Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models (Springer Series in Information Sciences, 22). 2nd edition. Springer Verlag. 416 pp. ISBN: 3540650636. Gen. Lib. Sci/Tech 4F QP461 Z92 1999
9. Hartmann, William, M. 1998. Signals, Sound, and Sensation (Modern Acoustics and Signal Processing). Springer Verlag. 647 pp. ISBN: 1563962837 Gen. Lib. Hum/Soc Sci 2F BF251 H35z 1998.
10. Cook, Perry R., ed. 1999. Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound: An Introduction to Psychoacoustics. Book & CD edition. MIT Press. 372 pp. ISBN: 0262032562 Gen. Lib. Hum/Soc Sci. 2F ML3805 M8814 1999
11. Bregman, Albert S. 1994. Auditory Scene Analysis: Perceptual Organization of Sound. Bradford Books. 773 pp. Reprint edition. ISBN: 0262521954 Gen. Lib. Sci/Tech 4F QP465 B74 1990. Companion sound disc: Albert S. Bregman, Pierre A. Ahad. Montreal: Auditory Perception Laboratory, Psychology Department, McGill University, c1995 available in Linguistics graduate program library (AL) QP465 B741z 1995
12. Deutsch, Diana, ed. 1998. The Psychology of Music (Academic Press Series in Cognition and Perception) 2nd ed. Academic Press. 542 pp. ISBN: 0122135652 Gen. Lib. Hum/Soc Sci. 2F ML3830 P9 1999
13. Wallin, Nils L., Bjorn Merker, Steven Brown, ed. 2000. The Origins of Music. MIT Press. 498 pp. ISBN: 0262232065 Gen. Lib. Hum/Soc Sci. 2F ML3800 O74 2000
14. Cousto, Hans. 2000. The Cosmic Octave: Origin of Harmony, Planets, Tones, Colors, the Power of Inherent Vibrations (Paper) LifeRhythm. Not available at NTU library.
Read a good phonetics book lately? Send over the title and we may add it to the list!