•Balanced focus on speech science, perception, and speech processing/engineering. •Comprehensive survey of speech production modalities and assessment/equalization techniques for increased robustness of speech systems in real-world applications. •All topics are accompanied with critical comments and original research by the authors. •The text introduces readers to closely-related subjects that rarely appear together in a single book. The bookprovides a survey on the variability of speech production due to stress, emotions, and Lombard effect, and its impacts on speech-enabled systems. The book is structured in 2 parts: speech analysis and speech systems. In the speech analysis section, both aspects of speech production and perception are studied, with the emphasis on significant trends of interest to speech scientists and phenomena that help engineers design robust automated speech systems. Attention is given to stress modalities underrepresented in the literature, such as physical task stress and cognitive load in real world scenarios. The authors comment on experimental design and confront studies conducted on simulated and real data. In the speech systems section, the authors focus on automated speech assessment, speech recognition, and speaker identification, with the emphasis on the design of the key system stages – front-end feature extraction and acoustic modeling. The text presents state-of-the-art techniques that increase system robustness when exposed to varying speech modalities.

Table of Contents:
Part A. Production and Perception of Speech Under Stress, Emotions, and Lombard Effect 1. Speech Production Variability 2. Models of Speech Production 3. Fundamental Frequency, Duration, and Intensity 4. Glottal Source and Vocal Tract Effects 5. Perception of Speech Variability 6. Auditory Models 7. Human Perception of Speech Modalities Part B. Speech Variability and Automated Speech Systems 8. Why do Speech Systems Break? 9. Sources of Distortion and Mismatch 10. Speaker, Environment, and Recording/Data Capture Based Variability 11.Speech and Speaker Recognition 12. Speech Variability in Speech Recognition Performance 13. Speech Variability in Speaker Recognition Systems 14. Domains for Improving Speech & Speaker Recognition Systems 15. Need for Speech Assessment in Speech & Speaker Recognition 16. Automatic Speech Assessment 17. Can We do Better? Boosting Robustness 18. Feature Extraction 19. Acoustic Modeling 20. Normalization/Compensation Schemes 21. Future Directions