Speech Science and Technology.

This book documents developments in speech science and technoloqy in Japan. Written by leading Japanese researchers, it contains a collection of articles which cover a wide range of interesting topics in speech processing. The book is organized into the following five chapters: speech production, speech analysis, speech synthesis and coding, speech recognition, and Iarge scale integration (LSI) circuits for speech processing. Most of the collected papers were originally published in Japanese during 1965-1985. The authors were asked to rewrite them in English. In most cases, they were free to add comments that were not in the original paper. Some even decided to append references that appeared after their original papers were published. In addition to the collection of papers, five leading Japanese experts contributed t o each of the five chapters an introductory overview. section which attempts to summarize the state-of-the-art in each speech processing topic. The book is not intended to be a complete account of all the speech research activities in Japan. Nonetheless, it was put together t o provide an instructive review of the research studies that lead up to the present status of the Japanese speech research. Overall, it is a good reference book for understanding the broad scope of speech science and technology in Japan. As the editor points out in his introduction, speech research in Japan has a long history which parallels the studies on American English speech sounds performed a t Bell Telephone Laboratories. There is a large body of literature published by Japanese speech researchers in the last 50 years. Even today, there are about 250 technical papers published each year on speech acoustics and presented at the Monthly, Spring and Fall Meetings organized by the Speech Research Committee of the Acoustical Society of Japan. However, these papers are all written in Japanese and are not easily accessible to most foreign researchers. This book attempts to select the most representative articles in each of the five speech research and development areas mentioned above and presents them in an organized way, so that the readers can get a comprehensive view of the Japanese R&D activities in speech science and technology. A detailed discussion of each of the chapters follows. Chapter 1 is devoted to speech production. The introduction is by S. Kiritani and M. Sawashima. It begins with an overview of the mechanism of speech production, followed by a discussion of progress in physiological studies, and concludes with a good list of references. There are five papers in Chapter 1 addressing various aspects of speech physiology. The first paper, by M. Hirano, is about the structure and behavior of the