Advances in Clinical Phonetics

Book excerpt: Advances in Clinical Phonetics focuses on important developments in phonetic description. Recent years have seen increasing developments in phonetic description, in both instrumental and impressionistic approaches. Not restricted to the phonetics of normal speech, clinical phoneticians and speech scientists working with disordered speech, have been at the forefront of recent work. Some instrumental developments (such as electropalatography), and some transcription developments (such as extIPA symbols), have been spearheaded by clinical phoneticians. The present collection describes and explores these developments. Part one consists of major accounts of advances in clinical phonetics contributed by major international researchers: Raymond D. Kent; William Hardcastle; Martin J. Ball and John Local; and Wolfram Ziegler and Erich Hartmann. The second part comprises six chapters where such advances are illustrated in the context of specific case studies, by authors from America and Europe: Fiona Gibbon, William Hardcastle, Hilary Dent and Fiona Nixon; Marie-Thèrése Le Normand and Claude Chevrie-Muller; Kate Moore and Anna-Maja Korpijaakko-Huuhka; Martin J. Ball and Joan Rahilly; P. Dejonckere and G. Wieneke; Nigel Hewlett, Nicola Topham and Catherine McMullen; and Shaween Awan. Demonstrating the wideranging and lively nature of the field of clinical phonetics the current contributions offer building blocks for further developments in phonetic description — both improvements in instrumentation and refinements in impressionistic transcription, leading to an increase in our understanding of the speech production process, both in normal and atypical speakers.