Klaus J. Kohler

Klaus J. Kohler (* 1935 in Karlsruhe) is one of the leading German phoneticians.

Klaus Kohler was born in Karlsruhe and lay there on his high school diploma. Then he studied from 1954 to 1960, the subjects English, Romance, Germanic and Phonetics at the Universities of Heidelberg, Besançon in France and Edinburgh in Scotland. He graduated in 1960 with the first state examination for secondary school teaching from, 1961, with a degree in phonetics at the University of Edinburgh. In 1964 he received his doctorate at Edinburgh University with a dissertation on English pronunciation in Scotland: Aspects of the History of English Pronunciation in Scotland. It was followed by the Habilitation at the University of Bonn in 1968 with the Generative Phonology of German and English.

Kohler has taught at the Universities of Edinburgh (1961-1966), Bonn (1966-1971) and Kiel ( 1971-2000 ). In Kiel, he was Director of the Institute of Phonetics ( until his retirement in 2000). His research activities focused on studies of phonetic and prosodic structures in the high and low German, English and French. For this research came increasingly to digital speech processing. From 1973 to 2005 he was editor of the series Working Papers of the Institute of Phonetics of the University of Kiel ( AIPUK ). At the international conferences that he organized in Kiel, was in 1989 a meeting of the International Phonetic Association (IPA ) for the recodification of the International Phonetic Alphabet (known as the " Kiel Convention ").

Kohler was, among other things known for his work on prosody and intonation of German, to the development of the Kiel Intonation Model ( KIM ) and the prosodic labeling ( PROLAB ) on the basis of the model and the implementation of this model in the German speech synthesis ('text -to-speech '). One of his students is William J. Barry.

Publications (selection)

  • Communicative aspects set of phonetic processes in German. In: H. Father (ed.), Phonological problems of the Germans. Studies of German grammar 10, 13-39. Tübingen: Gunter Narr (1979).
  • Dimensions in the perception of fortis and lenis Plosives. Phonetica 36, 332-343 (1979).
  • F0 in the production of lenis and fortis Plosives. Phonetica 39, 199-218 (1982).
  • F0 in the perception of lenis and fortis Plosives. JASA 78, 21-32 (1985).
  • Invariance and variability in speech timing: from utterance to segment in German. In: JS Perkell, DH Klatt ( eds ) Invariance and Variability in Speech Processes, 268-289. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum (1986).
  • Parameters of speech rate perception in German words and sentences: duration, F0 movement, and F0 level. Language and Speech 29, 115-139 (1986).
  • Computer synthesis of intonation. Proc. 12th Intern. Congr. Acoustics, Toronto, A6 6 (1986).
  • Categorical pitch perception. Proc. 11th ICPhS, Tallinn, vol. 5, 331-333 (1987).
  • The linguistic functions of F0 peaks. Proc. 11th ICPhS, Tallinn, vol. 3, 149-152 (1987).
  • An intonation model for a German text -to-speech System. Proc. Speech '88, 7th FASE Symposium, Edinburgh. , 1241-1249 (1988).
  • Macro and micro F0 in the synthesis of intonation. In: J. Kingston and ME Beckamn ( eds ), Papers in Laboratory Phonology I, 115-138. Cambridge: CUP (1990).
  • Segmental reduction in connected speech in German: phonological facts and phonetic Explanations. In: WJ Hardcastle, A. Marchal ( eds ), Speech Production and Speech Modelling, 69-92. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (1990).
  • Terminal intonation patterns in single- accent Utterances of German: phonetics, phonology and semantics. In: KJ Kohler, (ed. ) Studies in German intonation. AIPUK 25, 115-185. (1991).
  • Glottal stops and glottalization in German. Data and theory of connected speech processes. Phonetica 51, 38-51 (1994).
  • Introduction to the phonetics of German. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag (2nd edition 1995 ).
  • Modelling prosody in spontaneous speech. In: Y. Sagisaka, N. Campbell, N. Higuchi ( eds ), Computing Prosody. Computational models for processing spontaneous speech. 187-210. New York: Springer (1997).
  • Parametric control of prosodic variables by symbolic input in TTS synthesis. In: JPH van Santen, RW Sproat, JP Olive, J. Hirschberg ( eds ), Progress in Speech Synthesis 459-475. New York: Springer (1997).
  • Investigating unscripted speech: implications for phonetics and phonology. In: Festschrift for Björn Lindblom. Phonetica 57, 85-94 ( 2000).
  • About length in Low German? In: R. Peters, HP Putz, U. Weber ( eds. ), Vulpis Adolatio. Festschrift for Hubertus Menke 60th Birthday, 385-402. Heidelberg: C. Winter ( 2001).
  • Articulatory dynamics of vowels and consonants in speech communication. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 31, 1-16 ( 2001).
  • Plosive -related glottalization phenomena in read and spontaneous speech. A Stod in German? In: N. Grønnum and Rischel J. ( eds ), To Honour Eli Fischer- Jørgensen. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, Vol. 31, 174-211. Copenhagen: Reitzel ( 2001). ( According to German spontaneous speech pattern 2 (a))
  • (ed. ) Progress in Experimental Phonology. From Communicative Function to Phonetic Substance and Vice Versa. Phonetica 62 ( 2005).
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