Turk et al. – Acoustic Segment Durations in Prosodic Research: A Practical Guide

A guide to segmenting speech using acoustic features (i.e., spectrograms)

Tanner et al. – Multidimensional acoustic variation in vowels across English dialects

Looks at acoustics characteristics of vowels across many dialects of English.

Ladefoged & Johnson – A course in phonetics – Chapter 2 – Phonology and Phonetic Transcription

Basics of phonology and phonetic transcription. Read this over Speech Processing modules 1 and 2.

Wayland (Phonetics) – Chapter 8 – Acoustic Properties of Vowels and Consonants

An overview of the properties of vowels and consonants

Peterson & Barney – Control Methods Used in a Study of the Vowels

Examines the production and perception of vowels. This is a classic paper that many other studies on have built on.

Vaux & Samuels – Explaining vowel systems: dispersion theory vs natural selection

Cross-linguistic distribution of vowel systems

Cho & Ladefoged – Variation and universals in VOT: evidence from 18 languages

Voice onset time (VOT) is known to vary with place of articulation.

Ladefoged & Johnson – A course in phonetics – Chapter 8 – Acoustic phonetics

Links the source-filter model to spectrograms and acoustic analysis of speech.