Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Acquisition and the lexicon. Michael B. Broe and Janet B. Pierrehumbert (Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 414.

Abstract

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).