Laboratory Phonology 7 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Laboratory phonology 7 ed. by Carlos Gussenhoven, Natasha Warner Herrera Z. Esther Laboratory phonology 7. Ed. by Carlos Gussenhoven and Natasha Warner. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. Pp. xvii, 719. ISBN 3110170876. $41.95. This book contains selected papers from the Seventh Conference on Laboratory Phonology cohosted by the University of Nijmegen and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (28 June–1 July 2000). As the editors remark in the introduction, this was the first time the conference was held outside an English-speaking country. Two main changes distinguish this seventh issue: a new publisher and new series editors. This move has yielded good results. The ‘Papers in’ has been removed from the title, and every paper (except the commentaries) includes an abstract guiding the reader with respect to the topics and the findings reported. Additionally, the book is available in paperback, which makes it more affordable. This rather large book comprises seventeen papers, five commentaries, and three indices, and is partitioned into two sections: Part 1, ‘Phonological processing and encoding’ (eight papers), and Part 2, ‘In the laboratory and in the field: Relating phonetics and phonology’ (nine papers). But not all is new in this volume. As in the previous ones, every block of 3–5 individual contributions is followed by a commentary. The papers in Part 1 extend laboratory phonology into its newest relationships with psycholinguistics. Phonological encoding at different levels is investigated in the first three papers. Daniel Jurafsky, Alan Bell, and Cynthia Girand (‘The role of the lemma in form variation’) use a corpus-based statistical method to explore phonetic variations in production of ‘to’, ‘that’, ‘of’, and ‘you’, four English words each having one phonological form but more than one lemma. ‘Phonological encoding of single words: In search of the lost syllable’ is the title of Niels O. Schiller, Albert Costa, and Angels Colomé’s contribution. Here they test the masked priming paradigm [End Page 175] in order to determine the role of syllables in phonological encoding. The perception of intonation is the issue addressed by Vincent J. van Heuven and Judith Haan in ‘Temporal distribution of interrogativity markers in Dutch: A perceptual study’. Here the authors report their findings with respect to two perceptual tasks: hearing and gating a set of synthesized Dutch intonation patterns. They show the temporal development of cues signaling the statement vs. question contrast. Willem Levelt comments on the above papers (‘Phonological encoding in speech production’). In her contribution, ‘Word-specific phonetics’, Janet B. Pierrehumbert offers a particularly valuable exemplar-based model of speech production. Danny R. Moates, Z. S. Bond, and Verna Stockmal (‘Phoneme frequency in spoken word reconstruction’) reveal that vowels are more mutable than consonants in word reconstruction tasks. Haruo Kubozono’s paper, ‘Temporal neutralization in Japanese’, convincingly shows that neutralization of the vowel length contrast in Japanese has a close bearing on phonetics as well as visual and auditory perception. Sharon Peperkamp and Emmanuel Dupoux (‘A typological study of stress “deafness” ’) use four languages with noncontrastive stress (French, Finnish, Hungarian, and Polish) with the aim of testing the speaker’s ability to perceive stress contrasts. Ann R. Bradlow’s contribution, ‘Confluent talker- and listener-oriented forces in clear speech production’, investigates the amount of articulatory influence within CV sequences in clear speech. A commentary paper by Anne Cutler, ‘Phonological processing’, closes this section. The papers in Part 2 make significant contributions to the phonetics-phonology relationship. George N. Clements and Sylvester Osu (‘Explosives, implosives and nonexplosives: The phonological function of air pressure differences in stops’) give a theoretical look into phonetic facts. Based on acoustic, articulatory, and aerodynamic properties of nonexplosive stops in Ikwere, they propose that implosives are nonobstruent stops. In her contribution, ‘Assimila-tory processes and aerodynamic factors’, Maria Josep Solé lays out the aerodynamic forces involved in fricative to tongue tip trill assimilation. In Sónia Frota’s paper, ‘Tonal association and target alignment in European Portuguese nuclear...