Book excerpt: Originally published in 1963, The Speech Chain has been regarded as the classic, easy-to-read introduction to the fundamentals and complexities of speech communication. It provides a foundation for understanding the essential aspects of linguistics, acoustics and anatomy, and explores research and development into digital processing of speech and the use of computers for the generation of artificial speech and speech recognition. This interdisciplinary account will prove invaluable to students with little or no previous exposure to the study of language.