Explorations in the Acoustics of English Sounds

Explorations in the Acoustics of English Sounds is one of the rare books that is an immediate delight to thumb through at first acquaintance, and also a source of enduring knowledge and insights for both the novice and the experienced teacher. Three main aims have been achieved. First, the student is provided with a progressively organised, hands-on interactive introduction to the acoustics of RP English contrastive sounds. Second, the native speaker of Polish is helped to identify and eliminate errors in spoken English to the point at which he might pass unobserved. Third, Wiktor Gonet uses his profound knowledge of diverse spoken languages to discuss and exemplify phonetic differences between Polish and English that contribute to everyday intelligibility and acceptability. Running through the whole book is the theme that an appropriate visual display can be used to substantially improve the use of ordinary auditory and articulatory descriptors. This is done by the use of a large set of beautifully presented, graduated, and annotated displays of live spoken exemplars. [Prof. Emer Adrian Fourcin, University College London]