This volume contains a selection of the oral presentations at the Seventh Conference on Laboratory Phonology, which was held in Nijmegen in 2000, organised jointly by the University of Nijmegen and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Following ist predecessors, it aims to strengthen the empirical basis of current conceptions of the phonological capacity of man and to present data that will develop or modify those conceptions. In addition to the structure of phonological systems, the nature of their phonetic implementation, and the interdependence between these aspects of the speech chain, the volume focuses on the way we process incoming speech signals and the way we construct the surface representations made available for phonetic implementation. There are two sections. Part 1 deals with phonological processing and encoding. Phonological encoding refers to the retrieval of phonological forms from the lexicon and the way in which surface representations are constructed.Phonological processing approaches the issue of lexical representation by investigating the way listeners process spoken language. Part 2 deals with the relation between perceptual and articulatory aspects and the structure of phonological systems. It emphasizes the vitality of that relation by considering the role of new data, particularly field work data, for the development of phonological theory, and contains a number of striking examples of how such data can lead to new analyses of the featural structure of segments. Additionally in this section, empirically supported aspects of phonological theory are put to the test in a speech recognition algorithm.