Introduction

T he topic of this book, speech production, is about how a speaker makes use of the vocal organs to transmit both linguistic and nonlinguistic (e.g., emotional) meanings to the listener It is also about building machines to represent some of the stages of human speech production, and it includes both normal and disordered aspects of speech production in its various forms. Some of the chapters use speech production research techniques to measure and to model phonetic differences across languages. These themes represent sometimes overlapping, but usually complementary, ways of understanding speech production that draw upon knowledge from many different disciplines.