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Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics cover

Linguistics

Linguistics

Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics

Keith Johnson

An introduction to the physical signal of speech and the perceptual systems that allow listeners to identify and interpret spoken sounds.

Prerequisites: Introductory articulatory phonetics and comfort reading graphs; no calculus is required.

Difficulty Level
Advanced
Academic Level
Undergraduate
phoneticsacoustic phoneticsspeech perceptionlinguisticsexperimental methods

01 / Reading Guide

Reading Guide

Citation

Johnson, K. (2011). Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics (3rd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.

Chapter Summary

This short book of about 230 pages introduces the physics of speech and how listeners hear it. The third edition, published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2011, is described by the publisher as balancing accessibility with scholarly rigour. It is organised in two parts: five chapters of fundamentals, covering acoustics, signal processing, hearing and speech perception, and four chapters of speech analysis, each applying those tools to a class of speech sounds. Every chapter ends with recommended reading and exercises, and selected answers are given at the back.

Part I, Fundamentals (Chapters 1–5)

  • Chapter 1: Basic Acoustics and Acoustic Filters. The chapter begins with the sensation and propagation of sound, then distinguishes simple periodic, complex periodic and aperiodic waves, and closes with acoustic filters.
  • Chapter 2: The Acoustic Theory of Speech Production: Deriving Schwa. The chapter takes the source-filter view of speech. It starts from voicing and vocal-tract filtering, and uses pendulums, standing waves and nodes and antinodes in an acoustic tube to derive the vowel formants of schwa.
  • Chapter 3: Digital Signal Processing. The chapter covers continuous versus discrete signals, analog-to-digital conversion (sampling and quantization), and analysis methods: RMS amplitude, the fast Fourier transform, autocorrelation pitch tracking, digital filters, linear predictive coding, and spectra and spectrograms.
  • Chapter 4: Basic Audition. The chapter describes the anatomy of the peripheral auditory system, loudness, the frequency response of hearing, saturation and masking, and auditory representations.
  • Chapter 5: Speech Perception. New in this edition according to the publisher. It treats the way auditory ability, phonetic knowledge (including categorical perception and phonetic coherence) and linguistic knowledge shape perception, and ends with perceptual similarity, including a perceptual map of fricatives.

Part II, Speech Analysis (Chapters 6–9)

  • Chapter 6: Vowels. The chapter covers tube models of vowel production, perturbation theory, "preferred" vowels through quantal theory and adaptive dispersion, vowel formants and the acoustic vowel space, auditory and acoustic representations of vowels, and cross-linguistic vowel perception.
  • Chapter 7: Fricatives. The chapter covers turbulence, place of articulation, quantal theory applied to fricatives, fricative auditory spectra and the dimensions of fricative perception.
  • Chapter 8: Stops and Affricates. The chapter covers source functions (phonation types and sound sources), vocal-tract filter functions in stops, affricates, the auditory properties of stops and stop perception in different vowel contexts.
  • Chapter 9: Nasals and Laterals. The chapter covers bandwidth, nasal stops, laterals, nasalization and the perception of nasal consonants.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3

  • Simple, complex and aperiodic waves: the three types of sound wave distinguished in the opening chapter.
  • Acoustic filter: the vocal tract's shaping of a sound source, the basis of the theory of speech production.
  • Sampling and quantization: the two steps of analog-to-digital conversion.
  • Fast Fourier transform and linear predictive coding: analysis methods named for spectra and formant estimation.

Chapters 4–5

  • Masking and saturation: limits on how the ear responds to sound.
  • Auditory representation: how the ear's processing transforms the acoustic signal.
  • Categorical perception: the perceptual treatment of continuous acoustic differences as discrete categories.

Chapters 6–9

  • Quantal theory: the idea that some regions of articulatory space produce stable acoustic results, applied here to vowels and fricatives.
  • Adaptive dispersion: a theory of "preferred" vowel systems.
  • Perturbation theory: a way of predicting how formants shift when the vocal tract is reshaped.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

  • Physics built from first principles. Chapter 2 derives the vowel schwa from the acoustics of a tube, and Chapter 1 begins with the sensation of sound, so the reader meets each tool before it is applied.
  • Production, signal and hearing in one book. Acoustic theory, digital signal processing, audition and speech perception are covered together, and the speech-analysis chapters then return to each class of sound from acoustic and auditory sides.
  • Practice material in every chapter. Each chapter ends with recommended reading and exercises, and selected short-answer solutions are provided, which makes it workable for self-study. The publisher also notes sidebars on related topics.
  • Compact. The third edition is under 250 pages with a clear two-part structure, a manageable length for a one-term course.
  • Current edition. The publisher highlights a new chapter on speech perception that addresses theoretical issues as well as practical concerns.

Limitations

  • Technical material. Chapter 3 introduces digital filters, the FFT and linear predictive coding, so readers new to signal analysis should expect to work through that chapter with its exercises.
  • Selective coverage of speech sounds. Part II treats vowels, fricatives, stops and affricates, nasals and laterals; the contents do not list a separate chapter on other classes of sound such as approximants or on prosody.
  • No articulatory foundation. The book builds on an introductory course in phonetics, and does not itself teach transcription or articulation from scratch.
  • Edition date. The 2011 edition predates recent developments in software and methods for acoustic analysis.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is the acoustics-focused book in the phonetics and phonology list. Ladefoged and Johnson's A Course in Phonetics is the hands-on introduction to the production of speech sounds and transcription with the International Phonetic Alphabet, and is the natural first book. Peter Ladefoged's Elements of Acoustic Phonetics is an older, classic guide to the acoustic analysis of speech. Clark and colleagues' An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology combines articulatory, acoustic and phonological material, and Carley, Mees and Collins's Practical English Phonetics and Phonology is a workbook on the sounds of English. Odden's Introducing Phonology is a data-driven introduction to sound patterns. Johnson's book is the one to choose once articulatory phonetics is secure and the aim is to understand and measure the acoustic signal.

How to Use This Book

It suits undergraduates and beginning graduate students in linguistics, speech science or phonetics who have had a first course in articulatory phonetics and can read graphs.

A practical reading plan:

  • Core: Chapters 1 and 2 for sound and the source-filter theory, Chapter 3 for the analysis methods used in software, and Chapter 6 on vowels.
  • For perception-oriented courses: Chapters 4 and 5.
  • Consonant chapters: Chapters 7 to 9, in any order after the first six, depending on the course.
  • Practice: do the exercises at the end of each chapter and check them against the answers to selected questions, and analyse recordings in acoustic analysis software to match the Chapter 3 methods.