Relation of Descriptive Phonetics to Research in Speech Communication
Gordon E. Peterson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1966
This paper does not report experimental results but is intended to consider some of the more general objectives of research on speech communication. The conversion of physiological and acoustical measurements on speech to discrete units is one of the fundamental purposes of speech research. There is a substantial number of physiological parameters and of values within these parameters which are significant in the various languages of the earth. Descriptive phonetics provides a discrete symbolization for the numerous sounds which may be produced by the human vocal mechanism and which are significant in spoken language. An unambiguous and relatively complete system of phonetic notation is essential to experimental research on speech communications. The symbols may be specified by the phonetic parameters and parameter values, and each symbol should denote a unique set of phonetic parameter values. This is not true of phonemic symbols, however, since different tokens of the same phonetic type may serve as members of allophones of different phonemes.