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This book presents physical theory of speech production contained in Acoustics of Speech Production by R. S. McGowan and On Formants by R. S. McGowan in a largely non-mathematical way. New mathematics is presented in Appendices. There are a series of linguistic examples that are present illustrating how the physical theory illuminates understanding of phonetic processes, and, to some extent, phonological models. The physical theory is presented as mechanics instead of the usual electrical analogs, and it covers both the filtering of acoustic waves, as well as sources for the acoustics, such as voicing and air turbulence. Tissue vibration during speech is also reviewed. The linguistic examples include issues in speech development, vowel acoustic sensitivity in studies of delayed auditory feedback, hyper-articulation, and vowel tenseness. Also source-tract interaction, weak fricatives, future inverse modeling, and speech perception are considered.

This describes the basic physics of acoustics and air flow that occurs during the production of human speech. An approach that starts with the fundamentals of the mechanics of air is used so that both acoustic propagation, sources of sound, and tissue vibration can be examined with the laws of classical physics.

This book presents results in a study toward bringing acoustic and articulatory phonetics together for sonorant sounds, and, in particular, vowel production. Peter Ladefoged suggested proceeding in this project in his textbook, A Course in Phonetics. In acoustic phonetics the resonances, or formants, of the vocal the vocal tract is the primary way that vowels are characterized. In the present book, formants are examined using a physical acoustics approach; pressure, velocity distributions and energy densities of the formants of sonorants are used to examine tubes described by area functions. It is discovered that constriction length should be employed in an articulatory description of sonorants, in addition to the degree of constriction, place of constriction. Additional important parameters for English vowels are degree of lip rounding and larynx height. A new mathematical quantity called spatial phase is derived that can be used predict resonant, or formant, frequencies from area functions. This easily understood mathematical concept is slowly introduced using examples through much of the book. Spatial phase complements and generalizes acoustic perturbation theory. A special chapter on short constrictions and expansions describes their detailed physical acoustics and when lumped electrical elements are appropriate. The book concludes with numerical examples on how eight monophthongs of American English can be classified with the parameters of an area function model. That is, a simple area function vowel space is derived. The author calls for more systematic empirical studies of the relation between vocal tract articulation and vocal tract area functions.