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Articulation movements were studied in a rapid repetition of speech sounds. It was found that 100-150 msec after a transition from vowel to consonant occurs in the audible signal, the articulation apparatus of the subject assumes a consonant state. This undifferentiated state may fail to coincide with any of the consonants found in the given language. As new information comes in, it is more and more specified until a full correspondence with perceived consonant is attained. The specification goes on until all information on the consonant becomes available. The above results go to testify that articulation reflects the very mechanism by which the discriminative arrangement in the brain operates. It reflects the very process of the running synthesis of the articulation image of the consonant. This is contrary to the point of view which assumes that at first a phonemical classification is evoked in the mind. The authors uphold the theory according to which the process of discrimination of speech sounds involves a recoding of acoustic information into an articulative image. (Author), Trans. from Voprosy psikhologii, No. 6, pp. 26-39, 1962.

In support of research in digital speech transmission and speech bandwidth compression, several related tasks were completed. Master tape recordings of speech from 38 male and 19 female talkers were provided using microphones, preamplifiers, and equalizers duplicating those used for speech recordings. Material recorded by each talker consisted of 20 minutes of continuous speech, a regional dialect check list, a nonsense syllable list, and 6 PB word lists. Articulation tests were conducted to evaluate several vocoder configurations and data rates for two experimental vocoders. An analysis was made of phonetic errors for one vocoder configuration. Preliminary work was done toward vocoder evaluation by computer. (Author)