Essays in Speech Processes - Language Production and Perception - Augustine Agwuele
Harvey Sussman’s Scientific Contributions: A Brief Summary and Assessment
Essays in Speech Processes - Language Production and Perception - Augustine Agwuele
Randy Diehl
University of Texas at Austin
Description
Few investigators in speech science have made so many fundamental contributions across such a broad range of subdisciplines as Harvey Sussman. His work spans the domains of motor control and articulatory patterning, acoustic phonetics, speech perception, and neurolinguistics. He is well respected as both an experimentalist and a theoretician. This review summarizes some of his most significant findings and several main currents of his thought. Key topics include articulatory measurement at both the articulatory and neuromotor levels, feature detectors for speech, locus equations, animal models of perceptual mechanisms, and the theoretical description of coarticulation. It is argued that the Sussman’s work helps to resolve some key problems in phonetics and language studies.