Reviewed by Mikael Thompson, Bloomington, IN
This book presents ten articles on the phonological consequences of phonetic features of obstruents. Obstruents are characterized by turbulent sound, which makes their acoustic description difficult: the random noise produced by turbulence makes it hard to find invariant spectral features compared to speech sounds produced by laminar air flow.
Three articles treat obstruents crosslinguistically. ‘An overview of the phonology of obstruents’ (1–36) by T.A. Hall and Marzena Żygis discusses the distinctive features used to characterize obstruents versus sonorants and provides a survey of phonological processes affecting obstruents. John J. Ohala and Maria-Josep Solé’s ‘Turbulence and phonology’ (37–101) argues that aerodynamic constraints on obstruents explain many common sound changes and typological patterns involving obstruents. ‘Formant-cavity affiliation in sibilant fricatives’ (343–74) by Martine Toda, Shinji Maeda, and Kiyoshi Honda analyzes the acoustics of sibilants theoretically and compares this with instrumental and MRI studies of Polish sibilants.
Five articles discuss obstruents in specific languages. ‘A phonetic approach to the phonology of v: A case study from Hungarian and Slovak’ (103–42) by Zsuzsanna Bárkányi and Zoltán Kiss presents a production study of the realization of /v/ in various environments in Hungarian and Slovak that confirms predictions from aerodynamic constraints on voiced fricatives. Hyunsoon Kim, Shinji Maeda, Kiyoshi Honda, and Stephane Haas’s ‘The laryngeal characterization of Korean fricatives: Acoustic and aerodynamic data’ (143–66) complements a recent article by the first three authors on a stroboscopic cine-MRI study of the Korean lenis and fortis dental fricatives /s/ and /s’/.
‘Preaspiration as a correlate of word-final voice in Scottish English fricatives’ (167–207) by Olga B. Gordeeva and James M. Scobbie is an instrumental study of the tendency of speakers of certain dialects of Scottish English to preaspirate voiceless fricatives using a battery of acoustic measures. Two articles, ‘Phonetic characteristics of ejectives—samples from Caucasian languages’ (209–44) by Sven Grawunder, Adrian Simpson, and Madzhid Khalilov and ‘Tongue body and tongue root shape differences in N|uu clicks correlate with phonotactic patterns’ (245–79) by Amanda L. Miller, present interesting data on unusual, less-studied speech sounds.
Finally, two articles discuss sociolinguistic and clinical aspects of obstruents. In ‘Do differences in male versus female /s/ reflect biological or sociophonetic factors?’ (281–302), Susanne Fuchs and Martine Toda conclude from a study of the pronunciation of /s/ by German and English speakers that both biological and sociolinguistic factors are involved. ‘Producing turbulent speech sounds in the context of cleft palate’ (303–41) by Fiona E. Gibbon and Alice Lee provides an overview for clinicians of speech mechanisms for obstruents in individuals with cleft palates.
This book will be of interest to phoneticians and to phonologists interested in the relation of formal analyses of speech sounds to their physical bases, and it is strongly recommended to those readers.