This long-awaited work presents a theory of speech-sound generation in the human vocal system. The comprehensive acoustic theory serves as one basis for defining categories of speech sounds used to form distinctions between words in languages. The author begins with a review of the anatomy and physiology of speech production, then covers source mechanisms, the vocal tract as an acoustic filter, relevant aspects of auditory psychophysics and physiology, and phonological representations. In the remaining chapters he presents a detailed examination of vowels, consonants, and the influence of context on speech sound production. Although he focuses mainly on the sounds of English, he touches briefly on sounds in other languages.

The book will serve as a reference for speech scientists, speech pathologists, linguists interested in phonetics and phonology, psychologists interested in speech perception and production, and engineers concerned with speech processing applications.