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: Source Type: blogs