This book explores the various categories of speech variation and works
to draw a line between linguistic and paralinguistic phenomenon of
speech. Paralinguistic contrast is crucial to human speech but has
proven to be one of the most difficult tasks in speech systems. In the
quest for solutions to speech technology and sciences, this book narrows
down the gap between speech technologists and phoneticians and
emphasizes the imperative efforts required to accomplish the goal of
paralinguistic control in speech technology applications and the acute
need for a multidisciplinary categorization system. This
interdisciplinary work on paralanguage will not only serve as a source
of information but also a theoretical model for linguists, sociologists,
psychologists, phoneticians and speech researchers.