An introduction to phonetics is designed to help EFL learners to achieve native-like pronunciation:
Chapter one deals with the history of phonology and phonetics and provides a brief overview of the impact of philosophy and psychology on the emergence of phonology and phonetics. Chapter two defined the notion of phoneme, describes IPA phonetic alphabet, and distinguishes between board and narrow transcriptions. Chapter three and four provide an in-depth account of traditional and systematic articulatory phonetics, respectively. Chapter five discusses the place of suprasegmentals in phonology. Chapter six seeks to explain phonemics. Chapter seven provides a brief introduction to the rudiments of acoustic or physical phonetics. Chapter eight introduces the reader to the notion of auditory phonetics

The overall aim of the book is to provide an integrated view of the separate stages of the speech chain, covering the production process, speech data analysis, and speech perception. Analyses of information bearing elements of the speech signal have found applications in linguistic theory and in the knowledge base of speech technology with special reference to speech synthesis.
The book contains 19 selected articles organized in 6 chapters: Speech research overview with a historical outline, Speech production and synthesis, The voice source, Speech analysis and features, Speech perception, Prosody. Each chapter is preceded by an introduction including suggestions for additional reading. A list of all the authors publications since 1945 is included. It is supplemented by an ordering in categories. The articles have been selected to ensure representative coverage of the field. Some of them, primarily those on speech acoustics and the human voice source, have been previously published. During the last 15 years, a major emphasis has been on speech prosody with several novel approaches. A recent major article provides a broad frame starting with aerodynamics and voice source properties, leading up to intonation analysis, prosodic grouping, and rules for text-to-speech synthesis. These are illustrated in an audio file. A novel feature introduced in analysis as well as synthesis is a parameter of perceived syllable and word prominence with acoustical correlates and ties to lexical categories. The author was involved in early developments of distinctive feature theory together with Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle. Applications to Swedish are contained in the book. A major issue in current phonology and phonetics has been the search for absolute invariance of speech features. However, with the growing insight into contextual variability, this remains a pseudo problem. In order to approach the essence of the speech code, we need to structure variability with respect to all possible contextual factors. As claimed by the author, this is not only a requirement for a sound development of general phonetics and phonology. It is also a prerequisite for realizing advanced aims of speech technology. Computer power cannot substitute fundamental knowledge of the human speech communication process. The book should accordingly be of interest for several disciplines, not only speech technology, linguistics, phonetics, and acoustics, but also for psychology and physiology of speech and hearing with applications in medical science.

There are approximately six thousand languages on Earth today, each a descendant of the tongue first spoken by Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, linguistics professor John McWhorter reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues that, contrary to popular perception, language is not immutable and hidebound, but a living, dynamic entity that adapts itself to an ever-changing human environment.

Full of humor and imaginative insight, The Power of Babel draws its illustrative examples from languages around the world, including pidgins, Creoles, and nonstandard dialects.

Product Description
Raising Multilingual Children: Foreign Language Acquisition and Children elucidates how children learn foreign languages and when they can do so with the best results. The most recent studies in linguistics, neurology, education, and psychology are evaluated and the findings are presented in a "recipe" format. Parents and teachers are encouraged to "bake their own" and evaluate the multilingual children in their lives with the use of tools which include a family language profile and family language goals worksheet. Beginning with the Ingredients of Timing, (or the Windows of Opportunity,) and Aptitude, the book goes on to include the Baking Instructions of Motivation, Strategy, and Consistency. This is followed by Kitchen Design, or the role of the language learning environment. Plumbing and Electricity round out the ten key factors in raising multilingual children by discussing the possible role of Gender and Hand-Use, and our understanding of the multilingual brain at present.