Fundamentals of the Speech and Language Sciences (PDF)

For a strong foundation upon which to build their futures, students in communication sciences and disorders programs need the best, most up-to-date information available to guide them. To this end, Fundamentals of the Speech and Language Sciences provides a thorough understanding of the core concepts in speech and language while maintaining a readable, engaging tone.

Students will be exposed to the fundamentals of acoustics, respiratory science, voice production, acoustic phonetics, and sound spectrography. Language representation and motor programming as they pertain to the dynamic process of speech communication are also explored, as are the fundamentals of speech perception and instrumentation. To give students context, side bars feature the stories of seminal scientists and scholars and their contributions to the topics being discussed.

This text benefits from Dr. William Culbertson’s nearly three decades of experience in teaching, as well as another decade of experience as a clinical speech-language pathologist. That experience has honed his ability to clearly communicate these crucial topics in a way that students will understand.

Topics covered:

• The scientific method and various types of research used to study the normal aspects of human speech and hearing
• The basics of physics as they pertain to energy, motion, displacement, force, and pressure and their relationship to speech production
• The process of respiration as it pertains to gas compression, speech valving, driving pressure, impedance, and flow
• Voice onset, modes of vocal vibration, pitch adjustment, volume and quality
• The process of dynamic interaction representation at the cortical and subcortical levels of the five basic speech processes: respiration, phonation, articulation, resonance, and prosody

Undergraduate students in communication sciences and disorders programs, as well as the related programs of music (voice), special education, and speech communication, will value Fundamentals of the Speech and Language Sciences as the formative text for their understanding of the speech and language sciences.