Klaus J. Kohler

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

Klaus Kohler was born in Karlsruhe and passed his Abitur there. He then studied English , Romance studies , German studies and phonetics from 1954 to 1960 at the Universities of Heidelberg , Besançon in France and Edinburgh in Scotland . He completed his studies first in 1960 with the state examination for teaching at high schools, then in 1961 with a diploma in phonetics at the University of Edinburgh. In 1964 he received his PhD from Edinburgh University with a dissertation on English pronunciation in Scotland: Aspects of the History of English Pronunciation in Scotland . This was followed by his habilitation at the University of Bonn in 1968 with the thesis Generative Phonology of German and English .

Kohler taught at the Universities of Edinburgh (1961–1966), Bonn (1966–1971) and Kiel (1971–2000). In Kiel he became director of the Institute for Phonetics (until his retirement in 2000). His research focus was on studies of phonetic and prosodic structures in High and Low German, English and French. In addition, there was more research into digital language processing. From 1973 to 2005 he was editor of the series of reports of the Institute for Phonetics of the University of Kiel (AIPUK) . One of the international specialist congresses he organized in Kiel in 1989 was a meeting of the International Phonetic Association (IPA) on the recoding of the International Phonetic Alphabet (known as the "Kiel Convention").

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

Publications (selection)

• Communicative aspects of sentence-phonetic processes in German. In: H. Vater (ed.), Phonological Problems of German. Studies on 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, New Jersey: 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 Modeling, 69-92. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (1990).
• Form and function of intonation peaks in German; a research project. In: KJ Kohler, (ed.) Studies in German Intonation. AIPUK 25, 11-27. (1991).
• 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).
• A model of German intonation. In: KJ Kohler, (ed.) Studies in German Intonation. AIPUK 25, 295-360. (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).
• Modeling 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).
• Excessive length in Low German? In: R. Peters, HP Pütz, U. Weber (eds.), Vulpis Adolatio. Festschrift for Hubertus Menke on his 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 stød in German? In: N. Grønnum and J. Rischel (eds), To Honor Eli Fischer-Jørgensen. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, vol. 31, 174-211. Copenhagen: Reitzel (2001). (Sound pattern in German spontaneous speech 2. (a))
• (ed.) Progress in Experimental Phonology. From Communicative Function to Phonetic Substance and Vice Versa. Phonetica 62 (2005).

Web links

• Homepage on the website of the University of Kiel
• Literature by and about Klaus J. Kohler in the catalog of the German National Library