Page 7 - Fall 2011

FROM THE EDITOR Dick Stern 1150 Linden Hall Road Boalsburg, Pennsylvania 16827 I am extremely grateful to our guest editor, Jody Kreiman, for her ability to assemble an outstanding group of authors for this comprehensive issue on speech communication. Each discussed their area of expertise so as to provide the reader a glimpse into this fascinating subject. Dick Stern FROM THE GUEST EDITOR Jody Kreiman Some jobs are more fun than others, and guest edit- ing this issue of Acoustics Today was one of the good ones. The speech communication technical committee encompasses such a wide range of topics that I found it impossible to pick one on which to focus the issue, so instead I asked colleagues whose work I admire to write about what they were doing. The four papers that appear here are not especially “speechy” in the traditional sense of speech production, perception, and acoustics, but they highlight the growing scope of what now falls under the “speech communication” umbrella, and the interdiscipli- nary approaches that characterize much current research on speech. They also share a focus on the role that speech in particular and vocalization in general play in the biol- ogy and social lives of humans and non-human animals. As all the authors point out, considering speech in the broader context of social and biological functioning may enhance or even fundamentally alter our understanding of why speech behavior varies as it does. And the “why” questions are the most fun of all. 6 Acoustics Today, October 2011