Page 70 - Spring 2015

TeCHnICAl CoMMITTee RePoRT
Robert F. Port
Professor Emeritus
Postal:
Indiana University 5975 S. Handy Road Bloomington, Indiana 47401 USA
Email:
port@indiana.edu
speech Communication
Our group, the Technical Committee (TC) on Speech Communication, includes scientists who study all aspects of speech acoustics from linguistics to the physics of vocal fold vibration. Our members can be found in many academic depart- ments, such as speech and hearing science, psychology, linguistics, engineering, computer science, and neuroscience. Some of us work in industrial laboratories and consulting companies. The Speech Communication sessions at Acoustical Society of America (ASA) meetings are the primary international venue for re- porting on the latest research about speech production and perception, speech development, the phonetics of various languages and comparisons between them, speech technology, and biomedical issues related to speech communication. Ad- ditional technical areas include engineering methods like speech coding as well as physiological research on the production of specific speech sounds.
The ASA Speech Communication TC provides a friendly and supportive environ- ment for researchers and students to report on their latest results. We are the TCs in ASA. Of the roughly 1,200 papers presented at the twice yearly ASA meetings, between 300 and 500 deal with speech communication in some form. Many years ago, it was decided that rather than have a committee accept or reject submit- ted abstracts for oral presentation, we would have all the Speech Communication submissions presented as posters, except for special sessions organized around a specific topic. The result is that all who submit can be assured that they will have some interaction about their work with interested scientists, of course, from a range of different specializations. In fact, all members, including junior ones, are encouraged to organize special sessions of papers addressing a topic of current importance.
One important topic is how people are able to perceive speech, whether conso- nants, vowels, or speech intonation in various languages of the world. Although one might imagine that meetings in some other academic area might be the home for research on phonetics of all kinds, it has turned out that ASA meetings and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) became our academic home.
speech Perception
Researchers in the area of speech perception usually focus their experiments on a particular language and on a particular group of speech sounds. This work often involves either modifying natural speech or constructing synthetic speech stimuli for presentation to listeners. They typically develop models of how speech percep- tion is achieved and then test their models on experimental data. The availability in recent years of large speech corpora, such as from the Linguistic Consortium Database, has resulted in the development of innovative statistical methods in this area. This work hinges on the development of technical innovations for process- ing, modifying, and presenting speech signals with either auditory or audiovisual presentation.
68 | Acoustics Today | Spring 2015 , volume 11, issue 1 ©2015 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.