This textbook is a revision and expansion of A Manual for Articulatory Phonetics, compiled by Rick Floyd in 1981 and revised in 1986. It includes many other people's materials from articulatory phonetics courses as taught for over sixty years in the training schools of SIL International. It also includes much information from sources outside of SIL.
It is written in an informal, personal style and is a practical book for teachers and students alike. Most chapters begin with a statement of goals and conclude with a list of key concepts and exercises. Examples, tables, and explanatory figures are distributed liberally throughout.
This book is oriented primarily towards native speakers of American English, primarily with reference to examples used to guide pronunciation of new sounds. However, most of the information included should be profitable to students regardless of their native language.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is used for the phonetic transcription, but the equivalent Americanist symbols are also given in order to equip the student to use other linguists' materials, regardless of which system they use to transcribe their data.
(See the new Fourth Edition, ISBN 9781556711657)
Rick Floyd (Ph.D., U. of California in San Diago) has studied Wanka uechua in the central Peruvian Andes since 1981. He has taught phonetics and other courses at several SIL schools and is a linguistic consultant of SIL Peru. He is the author of The Structure of Evidential Categories in Wanka ueschua and numerous articles.
Anita Bickford (M.A., U. of North Dakota) specializes in second language acquisition and articulatory phonetics and regularly teaches courses in both at the Summer Institute of Linguistics, U. of North Dakota.