"Buenos dias", "buenas noches" -- this was the first words in a foreign language I heard in my life, as a three-year old boy growing up in developing post-war Western Germany, where the first gastarbeiters had arrived from Spain. Fascinated by the strange sounds, I tried to get to know some more languages, the only opportunity being TV courses of English and French -- there was no foreign language education for pre-teen school children in Germany yet in those days. Read more
To find some answers Tim Machan explores the language's present and past, and looks ahead to its futures among the one and a half billion people who speak it. His search is fascinating and important, for definitions of English have influenced education and law in many countries and helped shape the identities of those who live in them.
This volume provides a new perspective on the evolution of the special language of medicine, based on the electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, containing over two million words of medical writing from 1500 to 1700.
EDITORS: Fougeron, Cécile; Kühnert, Barbara; D'Imperio, Mariapaola; Vallée, Nathalie TITLE: Laboratory Phonology 10 SERIES TITLE: Phonology and Phonetics [PP] 4-4 PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton YEAR: 2010
J. Kevin Varden, Center for Liberal Arts, Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo/Yokohama
SUMMARY This volume consists of ''a selection of the papers and commentaries ... originally presented'' at the 2006 Laboratory Phonology 10 conference (LabPhon 10) held in Paris. The breadth and depth of the research represented here reflect the growth of the conference series and LabPhon enterprise from a small meeting of phoneticians to a diverse group of 240 speech researchers, both providing a fertile ground for interaction between all disciplines investigating human speech.
The theme of LabPhon 10 was ''Variation, phonetic detail and phonological representation'', continuing the theme of the first six papers of the LabPhon 9. These papers encompass variation within and between languages, in phonological acquisition, and between ''normal'' and ''disordered'' speech. Accounting for how listeners quickly access the correct lexeme despite a constantly varied acoustic speech stream is a core problem of speech recognition and language acquisition, reflected in other recent volumes (Solé et al. 2007; Cohn et al. 2012).
The volume is divided into 5 sections, each with a discussion paper or two, a total of 28 papers spanning 792 pages. As with most LabPhon volumes, the list of contributors is something of a Who's Who of speech research. Each paper contains its own references. Short reviews of each follow.
SECTION I, “Laboratory phonology: Tenth anniversary session”, has four papers plus commentary, introducing the series and volume, and providing background on the LabPhon enterprise and the 10th anniversary conference, as well as extensive discussion of models of how we acquire, perceive and produce our speech.
Abigail C. Cohn, ''Laboratory Phonology: Past successes and current questions, challenges, and goals'', discusses a wide range of issues: the questions and challenges raised by LabPhon; the models and assumptions underpinning the various frameworks, in particular descriptive vs. explanatory adequacy; issues related to modularity and avoiding redundancy; and the interplay between language universals and language acquisition. There is also worthwhile discussion of the ''perceived cost of redundancy'' (i.e. the belief that redundancy is bad; all things must be distinctive), as well as the outdated concept of a strictly binary-branching modeling of grammar.
Dani Byrd & Susie Choi, ''At the juncture of prosody, phonetics and phonology -- The interaction of phrasal and syllable structure in shaping the timing of consonant gestures'', extend the phonetics/phonology interface to the phonetics/prosody interface. Working from the knowledge that prosodic structure can strengthen C gestures, the paper strives to explain how this might be concretely implemented in the grammar. (See also Hawkins in Part V.) By examining how prosodic strengthening affects consonant coarticulation, the paper takes another step closer to a multi-level description interweaving phonetics and phonology.
Rachid Ridouane, ''Geminates at the junction of phonetics and phonology'', investigates acoustic and articulatory differences between single Cs, lexical (underlying) geminates, and derived geminates. Not surprisingly, a sample of 24 languages reveals length as the primary feature distinguishing single Cs from lexical geminates. Tashlhiyt Berber is then focused on, since it has single Cs, lexical geminates, geminates derived by morpheme concatenation, and geminates due to assimilation processes. Again, duration is the primary distinguishing feature. Additionally, phonetic enhancements of the underlying and assimilatory geminates are discussed.
Anne Cutler, Frank Eisner, James M. McQueen & Dennis Norris, ''How abstract phonemic categories are necessary for coping with speaker-related variation'', support the need for phonological categories to explain how listeners deal with speaker variation. While many models rely on matching stored memories to incoming speech, Cutler et al. show this is not possible due to the diversity of incoming speech that listeners (and especially language learners) must deal with. The authors claim that a model based on retuning of phonological categories by the listener is called for, one which can allow rapid generalization of speech input to other words.
Janet B. Pierrehumbert & Cynthia G. Clopper, ''What is LabPhon? And where is it going?'', is two papers in one. The first follows the citation trail of 23 LabPhon authors using the ISI Web of Science (WOK 2012), using citation network diagrams to illustrate the cross-disciplinary fertilization caused by the 5% and 20% most-cited publications. The beneficial impact of LabPhon on speech research and psychology is obvious. Secondly, the paper discusses the degree of abstraction necessary to handle complex speech. In the comments on prosodic strengthening and levels of representation is the intriguing proposal to represent vowel formants as eigenvectors, directed movement in 3D space (see also Cohn this volume). They suggest it is the constantly changing vowel formants that provide the listener with necessary information to determine the speaker's size, age, gender, dialect or native language, etc., in something akin to a turbo-charged Motor Theory of Speech Perception (Liberman & Mattingly 1985; Mattingly & Studdart-Kennedy 1991).
SECTION II, “Variation and language universals”, consists of three papers and a commentary. The Maddieson and Yu papers deal with covariation of features involving voice pitch, while the Kreitman paper addresses language typology in terms of consonant cluster voicing. Blevins ties them together in a wide-ranging discussion of how the phonetic variation that spurs phonological change is influenced by both (co)variation and language typology.
Ian Maddieson, ''Variation in co-variation: The search for explanatory principles'', discusses how covariation of acoustic features (such as high vowels being produced at a higher voice pitch) strengthens in clear speech and weakens in reduced speech--for example, the pitch difference between high and low vowels is greater in clear speech than in reduced speech. The lack of a clear overall correspondence between the variation of F0 and vowel height for English, Polish and French speakers in the study indicates the 'phonetic' portion of grammar may contain a great deal more language- or population-specific information than has been believed. In short, Maddieson suggests coarticulation effects occur both in the phonetics and the phonology.
Alan C.L. Yu, ''Tonal effects on perceived vowel duration'', uses English speakers to test observed co-variation between tone height (high, mid, low) and slope (rising or falling), and _perceived_ duration of the vowel carrying the tone. Yu found that, all things being equal, syllables carrying high tones were judged to be longer than those carrying mid or low tones, even when they were in actuality the same duration. The results are discussed in terms of proposals for explaining how such phonetic differences can drive phonological sound change.
Rina Kreitman, ''Mixed voicing word-initial consonant clusters'', examines the supposedly universal restriction against consonant clusters containing both [+voice] and [-voice] consonants. It discusses mixed voice clusters in Khasi, Tsou, and Hebrew (see also Gafos el al. this volume for Moroccan Arabic). Kreitman uses data from 43 languages (13 language families) to derive an implicational relation for clusters, with [-voice][-voice] being the most basic. This is followed by a detailed study of Hebrew since it displays a wide variety of voicing, place and manner combinations in its cluster inventory. The paper provides valuable test data for window models of articulatory timing (e.g. Bird & Choi this volume).
Juliette Blevins, ''Phonetically-based sound patterns: Typological tendencies or phonological universals?'', moves from discussing possible routes of speaker-induced phonetic ambiguity and listener-induced phonological change (e.g. the Meilke et al. paper this volume) to distinguishing typological tendencies from phonological universals. Blevins presents evidence from several other languages and comes to the conclusion that Kreitman’s implicational relation is not validated; she instead suggests Kreitman’s results are better viewed as phonetically-based typological tendencies. Blevins then discusses co-variation in the Maddieson and Yu papers, noting that the effect of speaking style (Maddieson) and listener perception (Yu) are crucial to understanding how phonetic traits impinge upon universal traits.
SECTION III, “Variation and the emergence of phonology”, contains three papers plus commentary dealing with issues related to language acquisition. Fikkert applies underspecification to a child’s developing phonology. Vihman compares child productions in six different language communities and draws conclusions about the factors affecting language acquisition. Goldrick and Larson use tongue twister data with regard to pattern-matching during language acquisition, while Ramus et al. place all language-related phenomena within the domain of psychology.
Paula Fikkert, ''Developing representations and the emergence of phonology: Evidence from perception and production'', discusses phonological underspecification during language acquisition. It provides evidence that children's early perceptions and productions are underspecified for all but the central vowel's features, and that children's errors can be attributed to this sparse feature representation. Interestingly, the children's performance distinguishing labials and velars from coronals seems to be dependent not only on the underlying feature representation, but also on which stimuli the children trained on before the perception tests. The scientist in the crib appears to be just as busy during testing as when at play. Despite the complexity of the argumentation, the data would seem to be important for accounting for the development of children's representations.
Marilyn May Vihman, ''Phonological templates in early words'', provides a meta-analysis of studies involving 33 children from 6 language populations: Finnish, French, Italian, Welsh, and both American and British English. The thorough analysis of early speech samples refreshingly includes IPA transcriptions. The study focuses on observed variation in individual productions, use of templatic material, and how children either emulate or adapt adult productions according to their own abilities (and predilections?). In addition it discusses the three-way interaction between universal principles of language acquisition, language exposure effects on both babbling and first word productions, and individual development from babbling to first words.
Matthew Goldrick & Meredith Larson, ''Constraints on the acquisition of variation'', discuss how learners create a grammar from the highly variable speech input. The authors used nonsensical tongue twisters containing /s/ and /f/ to compare speech error rates in syllable onsets and coda. In general, they found the more a sound appears in a given syllable position, the more likely that syllable position is to attract a speech error involving that sound. However, an /s/ in a syllable onset was almost always moved to a following syllable’s onset, even when the speech error ''target'' was the coda. The authors take this to indicate that the intrinsic characteristics of a speech sound (in this case, the very stable syllable-initial /s/) can also play a role in both the acquisition of syllable structure and how variation in the speech input is dealt with.
Franck Ramus, Sharon Peperkamp, Anne Christophe, Charlotte Jacquemot, Sid Kouider & Emmanuel Dupoux, ''A psycholinguistic perspective on the acquisition of phonology'', tie this section’s papers to the larger domain of psychology. There are valuable notes on the states of ''articulatory equipment'' during word learning, referencing the perception of phonetic details in terms of mirror neurons (Stamenov & Gallese 2002), and articulatory positions and vectors, an updated version of the Motor Theory of Speech Perception. We are reminded that all production and perception take place within the greater realm of consciousness; therefore the methods used to uncover grammar need to pay attention to all the levels of consciousness involved.
SECTION IV, “Variation at the crossroad between ''normal'' and ''disordered'' speech”,consists of four papers plus commentary, a total of 145 pages. The papers cover variability in speech at the border where language production begins to break down--attempting to explain how ''normal'' variation and disfluencies seen in everyday speech differ from and compare to severe disfluencies seen with physiological or neurological disorders.
Grzegorz Dogil, ''Hard-wired phonology: Limits and latitude of phonological variation in pathological speech'', opens with a discussion of aphasias, and how they overlap with and deviate from ordered language processing and output within various neuroimaging models. The paper finishes with discussion of the connection between ''hard-wired phonology and its neurocognitive bases'', including the reminder that all phonetic mapping is restricted by the prosodic and phonotactic regularities of the language. Particularly interesting is the way aphasiacs access syllable structure and simplify clusters, and how the perceptual salience of pivots and landmarks (Stevens 2002) affect access. It would be interesting to tie these insights with the underspecification models discussed in Fikkert (this volume) to compare the acquisition of syllable structure and features with aphasiac syllable structure.
Benjamin Munson, Adriane L. Baylis, Miriam O. Krause & Dongsun Yim, ''Representation and access in phonological impairment'', compares the phonological impairment of a group of American English-speaking children ages 3 to 7 with typically developing children on various picture-naming tasks. Overall, the phonologically impaired children showed no significant group differences from the typically developing children in terms of lexical retrieval or phonological encoding during picture naming. They did, however, show a comparative inability to learn non-words based on minimal exposure (fast mapping). It would seem that while they have difficulty encoding acoustic perceptual information, they are subsequently able to use encoded information to form robust phonological abstractions which are freely accessible. The discussion of the lack of syllable onset priming found in their second experiment again impinges on how children construct these abstractions and the features used to represent them (see Fikkert, Dogil above).
Timothy Arbisi-Kelmm ''Intonation structure and disfluency detection in stuttering'', compares disfluencies of 3 English-speaking stutterers spontaneously describing a picture book with those of 3 matched controls. Disfluency sites (function words plus following content words) are analyzed in terms of metrical phonology grids of the entire sentence rather than the local word-stress location. Results show that stutterers produced more anticipatory disfluencies at sites of phrasal accent than at sites of word accent, which supports the contention that speakers have access to prosodic structure ''well before articulation of the problematic material has ensued'' (p. 425). In contrast, the controls' disfluencies were attracted primarily to syllable onsets, suggesting problems with phonological/phonetic encoding.
Karen Croot, Claudia Au & Amy Harper,''Prosodic structure and tongue twister errors'', also suggest access to basic prosodic structure at the time of segmental/syllabic encoding, as per Keating & Shattuck-Hufnagel (2002). 40 native English speakers produced word lists with confusable onsets (e.g. 'den, ton, tuck, dial') first as word lists and then as sentential answers to questions. Each list had varying prosodic focus; this study is evidently one of few that have included prosodic effects in analysis of speech errors. Their results support the ''prosody first'' model of instantiation, with segmental/syllabic errors occurring after basic prosody is computed. The authors further suggest that widely-reported word-initial apeech errors are due to selection of similar but erroneous forms -- in other words, speech errors at the lexical level, not the phonetic level.
Ray D. Kent, ''Commentary on papers: Variation at the crossroad between normal and disordered speech'', begins by noting how the papers of this section impinge on the core issues involved in speech production and perception, specifically ''categorization of speech errors in normal and disordered speech, modeling serial order in speech production, perceptual representations of speech sounds, and neural models of speech production''. Also noted is how more obvious segmental errors might be overshadowing the low-level motor errors that are often categorized as simple variation (e.g. Goldstein et. al. 2007). There is also extensive discussion of the various models dealing with serial order in speech and the interface between perceptual representation and production of speech.
SECTION V, “Phonetic detail, processes and representation”, is the heaviest part of the volume, in terms of papers and pages: 8 papers plus 2 discussion papers comprising 310 pages. Many of the themes touched on in the papers above are covered here as well.
Sarah Hawkins, ''Phonetic variation as communicative system: Perception of the particular and the abstract'', sets the tone for the section by noting how phonetic detail (PD) influences every level of spoken communication. The paper recaps the POLYsystematic Speech Perception model (Hawkins & Smith 2001), where all levels of production, perception, grammar and memory are linked via a central prosodic tree. Crucially, ''phonetic information is distributed at all levels of the structure'', important since any higher-level consideration can introduce local change (e.g. emphatic stress affecting loudness, duration and pitch of a vowel in English). Just as importantly, features can map onto nodes of trees at any level of structure, not just at the level of ''segments''. The discussion wraps up with the how top-down informational flow of this model can be represented in terms of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neuroimaging studies.
Mark Pluymaekers, Mirjam Ernestus, R. Harald Baayen & Geert Booij, ''Morphological effects on find phonetic detail: The case of Dutch -igheid'', discuss words derived with the two variants of the Dutch morphome -igheid, one containing a morpheme boundary after -ig and one not. Three cases are distinguished: stemig-heid, stem-igheid, and stem-ig-heid. Corpus analysis of /xh/ clusters showed significantly longer durations for the form with no morpheme boundary even though the presence of a morpheme boundary is usually assumed to add length. Prosodic structure therefore does not always determine fine PD at the morpheme level; instead, in cases like 'zuinig-heid' where the word 'zuin' does not exist, the cluster does not add any particularly relevant information and so can be reduced. The authors therefore suggest the Morphological Informativeness Hypothesis accounts for the shorter durations better than the alternative Prosodic Structure Hypothesis.
Tamara Rathcke & Jonathan Harrington, ''The variability of early accent peaks in Standard German'', investigate three cases of accented vowels: a high tone plus down-stepped high tone, a high tone plus low tone, and a simplistic high tone. 12 native speakers repeated synthetic repetitions of a sentence where the pitch level on the accented vowel had been manipulated in a stepwise fashion. They also rated the sentences on eight pragmatic scales in a perception experiment. The authors followed this up with an analysis of the Kiel Corpus of Read Speech. Their results do not support a three-way contrast between the three tones for Standard German as has been claimed (Grice and Baumann 2002), but rather are due to ''phonetic, i.e. predictably related'' factors, especially the position in the prosodic phrase and the amount of segmental/syllabic data between the tones.
Rebecca Scarborough, ''Lexical and contextual predictability: Confluent effects on the production of vowels'', like Maddieson's paper in Part II, deals with enhancement or loss of PD of vowels -- in this case vowel duration and relative location in the language's vowel space. The stimuli were words of varying predictability due to lexical competitors; e.g., ''nine'' is easier to predict in ''A stitch in time saves nine'' than in ''The number you will hear is nine'' and so more often highly reduced. Overall, Scarborough found that both words with many lexical competitors (here, a difference of one phoneme) and those in non-predictable contexts contained longer and more distinct vowels. Scarborough concludes that lexical competition at both the phonological and lexical levels leads to the same hyper-articulatory adjustments. She finishes with extended discussion of the implications of the study on various models explaining observed neighborhood effects in speech.
Edward Flemming, ''Modeling listeners: Comments on Plyumaekers et al. and Scarborough'', starts by noting that although the amount of segmental/syllabic material encompassed by a tone phrase can easily be understood to affect the overall pitch contour (Rathcke & Harrington), it is much more surprising to see non-phonetic effects such as the lexical structure, word frequency, and neighborhood density just as clearly affecting PD (Pluymaekers et al. and Scarborough). To explain the effects of such listener-oriented production, Flemming forwards that listeners use simultaneous top-down and bottom-up processing of input. The paper also discusses the different predictions made by assuming whole-word and segment-by-segment (syllable-by-syllable?) monitoring by listeners.
Maria-Josep Solé & John J. Ohala, ''What is and what is not under the control of the speaker: Intrinsic vowel duration'', deal with the interaction between primary (phonological) features and any secondary (phonetic) features accompanying them. They investigated durational differences of high and low front vowels in Japanese (where length is phonemically distinctive), American English (where length enhances the tense/lax contrast) and Catalan (where length is thought to play no role). Their conclusion is that while in Japanese duration differences between slower and faster speech are likely due to (uncontrollable) jaw displacement, in Catalan and American English vowel duration is deliberately manipulated to enhance vowel contrasts. The authors also suggest the primary/secondary feature distinction is an oversimplification; it may be more useful to view features as a set of one or more (consciously) controlled features and any number of uncontrolled mechanical features.
Adamantios I. Gafos, Philip Hoole, Kevin Roon & Chakir Zeroual, ''Variation in overlap and phonological grammar in Moroccan Arabic'', study how timing of articulator movements is stored in the phonology. Two male speakers of Moroccan Arabic produced words containing two-consonant sequences in word-initial, -medial and -final positions, both with an intervening ''optional schwa-like vocoid'' and without. Articulator movements were analyzed within the ''onset-target-release'' model, and compared to data from other languages. The overall results show that the overlap patterns related to word position (initial, medial, final) and place of articulation order ([bt] vs. [tb], etc.) are speaker-specific and therefore under control of the speaker. Overlap differences due to homorganic vs. heterorganic clusters and homorganic clusters across affix boundaries are more stable and hence under the control of ''the grammar''. They also provide clear discussion of how the Obligatory Contour Principle can be reanalyzed as a prohibition of overlapping identical articulatory gestures, and how Arabic morphological templates relate to gesture alignment.
Jeff Mielke, Adam Baker & Diana Archangeli, ''Variability and homogeneity in American English /ɹ/ allophony and /s/ retraction'', used audio, video and ultrasound to investigate how a speaker’s pronunciation of /ɹ/ affects their /s/. First 27 speakers were recorded producing words containing /ɹ/ in syllable- and word-initial position, alone or in C clusters; syllable-final position, alone or in clusters; and when pronounced as a syllabic /ɹ/. Results agreed with other studies in terms of the range of tongue shapes used for /ɹ/. Then the pronunciation of 20 different speakers was analyzed, focusing on the /s/ palatalization observed in the Eastern U.S. (e.g. ‘strike’ = [∫tɹɑɪk]). While the discussion is quite technical, the conclusion drawn regarding phonological change is straightforward and familiar: What likely started out as a phonetically driven sound change in some speakers' speech (retracted /ɹ/ causing palatalization of the cluster-initial /s/) has spread throughout the speech community to even speakers who do not use the same retracted /ɹ/. In the authors’ words, “speakers may exhibit sound patterns that reflect someone else’s phonetic motivations”.
Claudia Kuzla, Mirjam Ernestus & Holger Mitterer, ''Compensation for assimilatory devoicing and prosodic structure in German fricative perception'', examine how prosodic environment, duration and voicing affect listeners' perception of underlying fricatives. German has a rule/law/constraint whereby a voiced obstruent devoices after a voiceless obstruent; e.g. Sand [zɑnt] 'sand' vs. hat Sand [hɑtsɑnt] 'has sand'. The authors ran studies to see how prosodic strengthening, fricative duration and fricative voicing influence identification of [v] and [f] (lexically contrastive) and [z] and [s] (non-lexically contrastive). The overall conclusion is that listeners not only compensate for progressive voicing assimilation but can overcompensate. The authors suggest the overcompensation they found with /z/ could be due to either auditory processing before the phonology or because a lexical contrast (/v/ and /f/) is extended to an environment where there is none (/z/ and /s/). Either way, the identity of a partially (de)voiced fricative is clearly influenced by the prosodic strength of its environment. Implications for several models of speech recognition are discussed.
Jean-Luc Schwartz, ''Filling the perceptuo-motor gap'', discusses the connection between the parts of the brain responsible for perception and to those responsible for articulation (the motor neurons). In short, if I have understood S. correctly, when acquiring language we do not just develop brain circuitry to imitate the articulatory movements of the speakers we are listening to, nor do we develop circuitry us to imitate the speech sounds we hear, but we also develop intermediary structures that allow us to emulate the sounds we hear via movements of our own articulators. S. sums up evidence from the other papers for connection (or lack thereof) between perception and production. He specifically takes issue with Solé and Ohala in two respects: the clarity of Solé and Ohala's claims regarding the link between speech articulation and speech rate is unclear; and S&H's expectation that vowel height (''formant dispersion'' in the paper) and duration are inseparable cues.
Most intriguing to me is S.'s discussion of Viviani & Stucchi's (1992) analysis of handwriting gestures. When an ellipse is drawn, the pen naturally slows down around the shorter radii. If an onlooker watches a pen drawing an ellipse at constant speed, they will perceive a slowing down in the shorter radii to match expectations based on their own experience. Conversely, a circle drawn with the faster/slower speed profile used for an ellipse results in the circle appearing elongated to match the observed speed. This speed/gesture relationship has been shown to hold for other natural gestures, including speech gestures; it appears that gesture experience and hence expectation extends to all perception. S. discusses how this mechanism might be used by listeners to overcompensate for perceived speech gestures while judging speech sounds. It would also seem to hold fascinating implications for sign language phonology.
EVALUATION This volume reaches the bar set by previous LabPhon volumes by examining variation in speech from multiple viewpoints, and will certainly contribute to the cross-fertilization of disciplines core to the LabPhon enterprise. Although by nature a diverse collection of papers, volume 10 connects well with both volume 9 of the series and the Laboratory Phonology journal.
The volume will appeal to speech researchers involved in phonetics and phonology (and both), but the content crosses over into models of speech perception and production, language acquisition, and disordered speech. Any psychologist working on speech-related phenomena should also find plenty of material worth mining. The potential for further cross-discipline cooperation and fertilization are great, especially since both theoretical linguists and language educators are still underrepresented in LabPhon. The papers are a tough read; anyone cracking open the literature for the first time should be prepared for some humbling (but rewarding) time on the learning curve.
One quibble is with the sparse subject index, four slim pages containing some less than helpful entries: The entry for “timing>articulatory timing” is “31-52'', the entire Byrd & Choi paper, although it is by no means the only one discussing articulatory timing; the entry for “natural classes” is “12-780”, the entire volume. The Subject Index is followed by a welcome Language index, although one might expect the Modern Hebrew and Lai entries to be accompanied by entries for ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Hakha Lai’, respectively.
The volume contains perhaps surprisingly few typological and grammatical errors for a multiple-author work of this size, the last two papers containing the majority of those noticed. (To be fair, those papers are eminently more intelligible than if I attempted to write in anything other than my native language.) Noticeable typos include the Unicode character for the Tsou segment [ɓs] (a voiced bilabial implosive-voiceless alveolar fricative cluster) on p.172, rendered as [=σ], although it does display correctly in the figure on p.174. An incorrectly referenced figure label at the bottom of p.297 in the Goldrick et al. paper caused a double-take (which subsequently brought to attention the typo in the accompanying figure). Likewise an incorrectly referenced figure in the Maddieson paper forced a recursion but was readily deducible. That said, with the possible exception of the index the volume has been authored, edited and published to the same high standards one would expect from this series.
In summary, the volume’s overall breadth and scope, as with other LabPhon volumes, contribute to the further understanding of how our cognitive functions deal with the planning and perception of speech and further stimulate cross-discipline fertilization of speech research. This volume, as well as the other LabPhon volumes and the JALP, are a must-read for anyone actively engaged in speech research, especially aspiring speech researchers, and a worthwhile endeavor for any “strict” phonologist or phonetician attempting to broaden their horizons.
REFERENCES Cohn, Abigail C., Fougeron, Cécile, & Huffman, Marie K. (ed.). 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Laboratory Phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldstein, Louis, Pouplier, Marianne, Chen, Larissa, Saltzman, Elliot, & Byrd, Dani. 2007. Dynamic action units slip in speech production errors. Cognition 103(3), 386-412.
Grice, M. and S. Baumann 2002. Deutsche Intonation and GToBI. Linguistische Berichte 191. Helmut Buske, 267-298.
Hawkins, Sarah, & Smith, Rachel H. 2001. Polysp: A polysystemic, phonetically-rich approach to speech understanding. Italian Journal of Linguistics / Rivista di Linguistica 13, 99-188.
Keating, Patricia, & Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stephanie. 2002. A prosodic view of word form encoding for speech production. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 101, 112-156.
Liberman, Alvin M., & Mattingly, Ignatius G. 1985. The motor theory of speech perception revised. Cognition 21, 1-36.
Mattingly, I. G., & Studdert-Kennedy, Michael (ed.). 1991. Modularity and the Motor Theory of Speech Perception: Proceedings of a Conference to Honor Alvin M. Liberman. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Solé, Maria-Josep, Beddor, Patrice Speeter, & Ohala, Manjari (ed.). 2007. Experimental approaches to phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stamenov, Maxim I., & Gallese, Vittorio (Eds.). 2002. Mirror neurons and the evolution of the brain and language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Stevens, Kenneth N. 2002. Toward a model of lexical access based on acoustic landmarks and distinctive features. JASA 111, 1872-1891.
Viviani, Paolo, & Stucchi, Natale. (1992). Biological movements look uniform: Evidence of motor-perceptual interactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance 18, 603-623.
WOK 2012. http://wokinfo.com/. Accessed March 9, 2012. (Requires institutional affiliation or the equivalent.)
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
J. Kevin Varden received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington’s
Dept. of Linguistics in 1998. Although steeped in Generative Phonology,
work on his dissertation on Japanese vowel devoicing led him to Laboratory
Phonology, and there has been no going back. Other current research
interests include the use of technology in teaching and the linguistic
history of the Japanese language.
