This stimulating volume is the outcome of a 1996 conference, the first in the laboratory
phonology series to incorporate psycholinguistic topics, including six chapters addressing
acquisition. Here, as in the earlier conferences, the primary focus is on the relationship between
phonetics and phonology. For example, in the first section, “Articulation and Mental
Representation,” Munhall, Kawato, and Vatikiotis-Bateson provide a lucid account of the
state of the art in physical models of articulation; they conclude with a discussion of the difficulty
of identifying the interface between phonology and speech production. In a related study, the
relevance of overarching prosodic structure (“phrasal signatures”) to low-level
articulatory effects is illustrated in some detail by Byrd, Kaun, Narayanan, and Saltzman, who find
that “prosodic structure is manifest in the details of articulation. . . . The abstract symbolic
representation useful to linguistics [must be integrated] with a dynamical model of
human movement useful to speech scientists” (p. 85).
