Tribute to Ken Stevens -- Guest post by Sheila Blumstein
Ken Stevens
passed away last week. He was without question one of the giants in the field
of speech. His contributions are legion – he is best known for the quantal theory of speech, a theoretical
framework that ‘explains’ the mapping between acoustic and articulatory events
and the basis for the finite inventory of speech sounds found in natural
language. Ken proposed that there are regions in articulatory space which give
rise to small acoustic changes and other regions which give rise to large
acoustic changes. These areas of change define the finite inventory of possible
speech sounds. That there are regions of acoustic stability suggests that there
is acoustic invariance in speech.
Namely, there are acoustic properties corresponding to phonetic features that
remain stable across phonetic context, position, and speaker. Ken’s work
provided an empirical basis for the distinctive features proposed by Roman
Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle in their 1951 monograph Preliminaries to Speech Analysis. Distinctive
features have been considered to be the representational units underlying the
phonological inventories of natural language. Throughout his work, Ken emphasized the
importance of acoustic landmarks which define natural boundaries used by the
perceptual and ultimately the linguistic system for characterizing the
phonetic/phonological properties of speech. Ken, in collaborative work with...
Source: Talking Brains - Category: Neurologists Authors: Greg Hickok Source Type: blogs
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