Alcohol and Speech

"Alcohol and Speech" serves as a single, unifying reference source for those interested in speech motor effects evident in the acoustic record, reaction times, speech communication strategies, and perceptual judgments. Written by a linguist and a psychologist, the book provides an analytic orientation toward speech and alcohol with an emphasis on laboratory-based research in acoustic-phonetics and speech science. It is a comprehensive review of the effects of alcohol on speech and compares the various theoretical concerns which form this research. Studies of both alcohol and speech have been rare because each field has its own experimental protocols, methodologies, and research agendas. This book fills a long-standing gap and is unique in providing both breadth of coverage and depth of analysis. A case study involving the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound develops some of the legal implications of this research. It illustrates a unified perspective for the study of alcohol and speech. It contains the benefit of years of research on alcohol and speech. It provides a wealth of research to investigators in a wide variety of disciplines: medicine, psychology, speech, forensics, law, and human factors. It demonstrates how alcohol and speech research applies in a practical situation: the Exxon Valdez grounding. It includes a glossary as well as numerous tables and graphs for a quick overview of data and results.