Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages

This book is the text for the introductory phonetics course I am currently taking. It has a strong acoustic basis, and lots of charts, graphs, and spectra.

Most of us have no background in either phonetics or acoustics (as might be expected in a linguistics program). Although the illustrations are undoubtedly of the sort which are most commonly used in the field, to a student not already familiar with what they represent, they can be mystifying. An introduction and explanation of the scales used would have saved us a lot of class time we spent getting a grasp of this.

Peter Ladefoged has recently revised his two fine introductory texts, "Elements of Acoustic Phonetics" and "A Course in Phonetics" and, in 1996, published an advanced text on phonology "The Sounds of the World's Languages" with Ian Maddieson, his collaborator phonologist in their first-hand, on-site studies of African languages and many others. His new book brings acoustic phonetics and phonology together in a brilliantly designed course, complete with a CD-ROM containing many important and interesting examples and demonstrations. After such a fine introduction, the student is ready to study phonology and/or phonetics more intensively and become a professional. The generous number of figures and tables are well chosen; the coverage of technical techniques and their applications for research are broadly representative of speech science and technology. This is one book that lives up to the glowing remarks of colleagues on the back cover. My own more-advanced book, "The Acoustics of Speech Communicatiion" will work better, especially for linguistics students, if they have used "Vowels and Consonants" for their first course.