Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Language (review)

Vowels and consonantsis about ‘the sounds of languages’ (xiii). First published in 2001, it introduces some of the basic concepts of acoustic and articulatory phonetics, but unlike the author’s classic A course in phonetics(Ladefoged 2006), it focuses more on acoustics and the use of computers in phonetic and speech technology.

Its author, Peter Ladefoged, was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Phonetics at UCLA and Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California. L was one of the most admired and influential phoneticians in the world, and his passing in January 2006 is a tremendous loss for the linguistic community at large.

A book notice on the first edition of Vowelswas written for Languagein 2002 by Alan Kaye, who remarked that this was the first book of its kind to have its own website. The second edition includes a new chapter on listening to speech, a revision of the sections on speech synthesis and speech recognition, and a more extensive discussion of endangered languages in Ch. 1. It has its own updated website (www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels.contents.html) and the accompanying CD-ROM has also been updated and enriched with data from over one hundred languages from the UCLA language archives.

One striking characteristic of this volume, as with the first, is the unconventional presentation of topics. Acoustics is presented before articulation, and pitch and loudness are discussed well before vocalic and consonantal quality. L does not address these choices directly, but he comments: ‘we will begin our description of the sounds of languages by considering the sound waves that are produced when we talk. This is by far the most scientific way of describing speech available at the moment. We can see some of the actions of the tongue and lips that produce speech sounds, but we don’t really know how to quantify these actions’ (6). While some might object to mention of our supposed ignorance of empirical means to informatively investigate articulation, L is sure and consistent in teaching the importance of scientific quantification to arrive at accurate knowledge.

The focus of this book is clearly the presentation of sounds in as scientific and objective a way as possible. In L’s view this motivates the choice and presentation of topics and the amount of coverage given to acoustic phonetics. In fact, Chs. 2–10 are mostly devoted to acoustic description and Chs. 11–15 to gestural description, while IPA symbols are discussed mostly in the final chapter.

Vowelsstarts with a chapter that briefly discusses the evolution of languages and sounds. Pitch and loudness are covered in Ch. 2, while the acoustics of vowels and consonants are the focus of Chs. 3–5 and 6, respectively. The next four chapters deal with various aspects of acoustic analysis. Speech synthesis is presented in Ch. 7, which discusses how speech can be synthesized from a limited set of parameters. ‘Talking computers’ and text-to-speech systems are introduced in Ch. 8, while Ch. 9 brings a consideration of ‘listening computers’ and machine speech recognition.

Ch. 10 is for me the most fascinating chapter in this volume. It focuses on how people listen to speech, and it includes coverage of confusion matrices, categorical perception, and top-down vs. bottom-up processing, among other topics. The inclusion of these topics in an introductory phonetics textbook is unique and makes this chapter an excellent resource for use in phonetics and introductory linguistics courses. It is also in this chapter that L introduces the idea that ‘vowels and consonants may be simply convenient fictions for use in describing speech’ (109), a notion he follows up on in the final chapter.

Chs. 11–13 describe various articulatory aspects of vowels, consonants, and the larynx. After this, consonants and vowels across the world’s languages are considered, while the final chapter (Ch. 16) deals with vowels and consonants in running speech. This...