ABSTRACT
Pictorial Definitions of Key Acoustic Phonetic Concepts - provides pictorial illustrations and definitions of key acoustic phonetic concepts. This approach is preferred to the traditional prose-based definitions because a picture is worth 1,000 words. In so doing, abstract concepts in physics and acoustics are made tangible. Spectrographs of periodic, aperiodic, and transient waves are provided. Step-by-step visualization techniques help readers unfamiliar with acoustic phonetics to learn to discriminate between vowels, stops, fricatives, nasals, and approximants just by inspecting waveforms and spectrographs. Information related to text grid annotations allows novices to understand how acoustic features such as F0, F1, F2, F3, F4, intensity and duration are extracted. This chapter also explains the history, the breakthroughs, and the rationale behind the Just Noticeable Difference (JND) thresholds used in this book to interpret measurements. The chapter also lays the groundwork in support of a new methodology that assesses intelligibility instrumentally and “scientifically” instead of relying exclusively on native speakers’ auditory acuity.
