Spoken Modality Research Articles

Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained

Milton scholars have accepted at face value Milton's linking of the Son in Paradise Regained with patient or longsuffering Job. This article argues that Milton's representation of the Son is equally indebted to the Job who questions God's justice in the central dialogue of the book of Job. Job's rhetoric also is a model for the Son's ironic mode of speaking and for Milton's own literary relationship to Scripture.

The Life and Death of Language. A Kristevan Reading of the Poets Gwyneth Lewis and Medbh McGuckian

This reading of Gwyneth Lewis (born 1959) and Medbh McGuckian (born 1950) considers language and identity through the frame of Julia Kristeva’s ideas about foreignness, strangeness and abjection. For Lewis, the focus is the loss of Cymraeg (the Welsh language), while McGuckian’s key poems present lost languages and minor modes of speaking. The death of Cymraeg and Gaelige (the Irish language) is read through Kristevan theory, which helps to explore the consequent abject breakdown of selfhood. For both poets, the death of language is worked through European poetics, in which a metaphysical distance allows fresh comment on culture and identity. For Lewis, this dictates a dialogue with Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), while McGuckian gestures to the poetics of Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938). What emerges is ekstasis, a state that Kristeva describes as going beyond oneself, and ekstasis is represented by both poets through the figure of the angel. The appearance of the angel after the breakdown of language and identity represents possibilities in being exiled from a stable sense of self, which in itself reflects the potential of minor or marginal cultures.

A common language: Using B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior for assessment and treatment of communication disabilities in SLP-ABA.

Introduction During the last decade there has been a growing trend for direct collaboration between the fields of speech-language pathology (SLP) and applied analysis (ABA). A common overlap between the focus of the two fields is in the area of communication assessment and intervention for the purposes of enhanced interaction skills and management of inappropriate behaviors resulting from inadequate communication skills (Koenig and Gerenser, 2006). Disagreements among professionals from both fields often can be a result of a difference in terminology. Take for example, the definition of the term A definition adopted by the American Speech-Language Hearing Association was developed by the National Joint Committee for the Communicative needs of Persons with Severe Disabilities (1991, p. 2). Any act by which one person gives to or receives from another person information about that person's needs, desires, perceptions, knowledge or affective states. Communication may be intentional or unintentional, may involve conventional or unconventional signals, may take linguistic or nonlinguistic forms, and may occur through spoken or other modes. This definition emphasizes the shared meaning established between a speaker and a listener. The Joint Committee concluded, Thus, all persons do communicate in some way. Additionally, the success of a communicative exchange could depend on the listener happening to witness the speaker's and interpreting that as communicative. The 1957 publication of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior provided the field of ABA with a definition of communication. Skinner refers to behavior as reinforced through the mediation of other people (p.2) and specified that the 'listener' must be responding in ways which have been conditioned precisely in order to reinforce the of the speaker [by the verbal community] ... In other words, a speaker acts in a manner that is under the stimulus control of an audience (a listener) and the listener then provides the reinforcing consequence. It is through reinforcement of a specific verbal community (the French, the English, the Spanish) that a child learns the grammar and vocabulary of a particular community. The definitions from both fields emphasize that communication can occur in many modalities, just the spoken modality. A source of confusion in the field of SLP has been in defining the terms speech, communication, and verbal. Reports of a student including phrases such as not verbal, or non-verbal, can lead to erroneous conclusions. A speech pathologist might assume that this means that the student is yet speaking. A person using Skinner's definition would conclude that the student has no communication skills at all in any modality. The less ambiguous terminology to describe the student who is speaking would be non-speaking or non-vocal. This could mean that the student has a sophisticated language system in a non-speech modality such as pictures, sign language, or writing. Skinner's definition also helps us to identify behaviors of a student that are verbal behavior. Behaviors that lead to direct access to reinforcing consequences are communicative because access to those consequences is dependent upon another person. For example if a student goes to a table and picks up a we would say that this is communicative as the action was aimed directly at the book. On the other hand, if the student says to the teacher sitting at the table, I want that book, and the teacher hands it to the student, we would say that this is verbal behavior. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of Skinner's analysis of verbal and its application to assessment and remediation of communication deficits. A description of Skinner's primary verbal operants will be provided. …

Serial verb constructions in Òkó

The article explores the ways Òkó speakers construe experience as a flow of events through the verbal group in a clause. Some events which are construed in some languages as a nuclear process made up of a single event (that is a single verbal group) are expressed in Òkó through a series of verbs, usually referred to as ‘serial verb construction’ or ‘verbal group complex’ (see Matthiessen, 1995: 62). This article describes serial verb construction as a useful resource, systematically organized in Òkó, for expressing different logical relations in the semantics of the verbal group. Òkó is spoken in Kogi State—the Middle Belt of Nigeria, West Africa—by a population of about 60,000 people. It belongs in the West-Benue group of the Niger-Congo family. At present, the language exists only in the spoken mode. This study is a step towards a detailed description and codification of Òkó, to facilitate oracy and literacy in the language.

The Impact of Visual Sequencing of Graphic Symbols on the Sentence Construction Output of Children who have Acquired Language

Although the sequence of graphic or pictorial symbols displayed on a communication board can have an impact on the language output of children, very little research has been conducted to describe this. Research in this area is particularly relevant for prioritising the importance of specific visual and graphic features in providing more effective and user-friendly access to communication boards. This study is concerned with understanding the impact ofspecific sequences of graphic symbol input on the graphic and spoken output of children who have acquired language. Forty participants were divided into two comparable groups. Each group was exposed to graphic symbol input with a certain word order sequence. The structure of input was either in typical English word order sequence Subject- Verb-Object (SVO) or in the word order sequence of Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). Both input groups had to answer six questions by using graphic output as well as speech. The findings indicated that there are significant differences in the PCS graphic output patterns of children who are exposed to graphic input in the SOV and SVO sequences. Furthermore, the output produced in the graphic mode differed considerably to the output produced in the spoken mode. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed

Adapting speaking after evidence of misrecognition: Local and global hyperarticulation

In this paper we examine the two-way relationship between hyperarticulation and evidence of misrecognition of computer-directed speech. We report the results of an experiment in which speakers spoke to a simulated speech recognizer and received text feedback about what had been “recognized”. At pre-determined points in the dialog, recognition errors were staged, and speakers made repairs. Each repair utterance was paired with the utterance preceding the staged recognition error and coded for adaptations associated with hyperarticulate speech: speaking rate and phonetically clear speech. Our results demonstrate that hyperarticulation is a targeted and flexible adaptation rather than a generalized and stable mode of speaking. Hyperarticulation increases after evidence of misrecognition and then decays gradually over several turns in the absence of further misrecognitions. When repairing misrecognized speech, speakers are more likely to clearly articulate constituents that were apparently misrecognized than those either before or after the troublesome constituents, and more likely to clearly articulate content words than function words. Finally, we found no negative impact of hyperarticulation on speech recognition performance.

Speaking on the record: A theory of composition

This article explores ways in which some of what has been achieved through the use of writing can be achieved in the domain of the oral and ways in which the use of oral forms might be revalued as literate composition. Toward these ends, I introduce a new word and practice to provide a counterpart to writing in a spoken modality: Spriting in its general form is the activity of speaking “on the record” that yields a technologically supported representation of oral speech with essential properties of writing, such as permanence, and offers possibilities of editing, indexing, and scanning but without the difficult transition to a deeply different form of representation such as writing itself. Literacy is defined here as the sophisticated structures and elements that characterize linguistic stories and ideas, largely but not completely independent of the material ways in which these structures are realized. That is, this article distinguishes literacy from letteracy , which refers to textual decoding and encoding abilities, and I introduce another new term, prosodacy , which refers to oral decoding and encoding abilities. Based on outcomes from two years of exploratory empirical work with adult learners and young children using novel spriting software I designed and developed for them, I discuss four areas in which spriting-like activities and technology can have a positive impact on literacy development and education.

Is spreekstyl en spreektempo sinonieme? 'n Fonologiese ondersoek

Generally phonologists take speech style and speech rate to be synonymous. The research hypothesis of the present study is that the rule application probability (RAP) is directly linked to the rate in which speech is produced, be it read speech or spontaneous speech. The phonological processes under investigation concerned consonant deletion and vowel reduction. We expected the RAP to escalate as rate of speech increases, irrespective of the mode in which the speech was produced. We firstly analysed the read speech of 120 Afrikaans-speaking persons. This speech was produced in two rates: normal and fast. We calculated the RAP of the four processes mentioned. An analysis of the readings of weather reports and temperature predictions by professional Afrikaans radio presenters is a further support for this. We then conducted two experiments, one comprising a reading and a story-telling task. They also produced a set of test phrases. In the second experiment we controlled both speech rate and mode of production. A story was told by the participants to the experimenter, at the same two rates. RAP's of each instance were again calculated. The findings very strongly supported our general hypothesis, namely that RAP is governed by speech rate, irrespective of mode of speaking.

The role of discourse markers in an Afrikaans stage translation of the merchant of Venice

Summary In drama texts the written and the spoken modes work together to communicate multiple and complex messages simultaneously. Consequently, the dramatic text has a dual role in both the literary and the theatrical systems of a particular culture. This duality has also influenced the translation of drama. If the drama is intended to appear in print only, the translator is likely to approach the translation as a literary text and will then produce a page translation. In contrast, if the main aim is staging the drama, the translator will create a stage translation that will appeal to contemporary theatre‐goers. Both page and stage translations of drama texts are written for spoken delivery. In other words, the dialogue in such texts is usually designed to simulate real‐life, face‐to‐face communication. This is also the case in Shakespeare dramas and their translations. When a recent stage translation of The Merchant of Venice in Afrikaans is compared to an older page translation it is clear that the stage translator has deliberately employed certain linguistic features to simulate participation or “involvement” between characters and make them sound more like real people in authentic situations (Kruger 2000). It is therefore no surprise that the stage translation exhibits more contractions than the page translation‐this is a primary method in any language to indicate spoken speech. What is unusual, though, is the deliberate insertion of a far wider range of discourse markers in the stage translation, despite its being much shorterthan the page translation. The only logical explanation for this particular finding is that the translator has actively attempted to influence the conversational coherence of the dramatic dialogue of the stage translation by foregrounding the interpersonal and text‐building functions of discourse markers such as feedback words, interjections, exclamations, vocatives and courtesy adjuncts.

Mode and modal transfer effects on performance and discourse organization with an information retrieval dialogue system in natural language

This paper describes an experiment on the effects of learning, mode of interaction (written vs. spoken) and transfer mode on user performance and discourse organization during interaction with a natural language dialogue system. Forty-eight participants took part in a series of 12 dialogues with an information retrieval system presented either in the written or the spoken mode during the first six dialogues. The next six dialogues were then presented either in the same interaction mode or in another mode. The analysis of the results showed that performance (time, number of effective turns) improved throughout the dialogues whatever the mode of interaction. Nevertheless, performance was higher in the written mode. Moreover, mode-specific characteristics were observed. These consisted in greater use of subject pronouns and articles in the spoken mode. Similarly, in the spoken mode, the users found it easier to re-use the formulations presented in the system speech than in the written mode. Furthermore, the analysis also revealed a positive transfer effect on performance and discourse organization when the individuals first interacted in the spoken mode and then in the written mode. Both positive and negative transfer effects were observed when the individuals interacted first in the written mode followed by the spoken mode. The implications of the results are discussed in terms of direct and indirect consequences of modality effects on natural language dialogue interaction.

The effect of literacy, text type, and modality on the use of grammatical means for agency alternation in Spanish

Abstract The paper explores developmental patterns in a set of grammatical constructions that Spanish speaker-writers can use for agency alternation. Although all these constructions downgrade agency, they differ in the way they do so, and in the formal devices they use for this purpose. Some promote a patient perspective ( ser -marked passives and se -passives), others promote a generic interpretation of agents ( se -impersonals and 2nd person singular), while still others impute a degree of autonomy to the situation denoted by the predicate ( se -middles). All these constructions appear more frequently in expository texts than in narrative texts and, except for 2nd person singular pronouns, more appear in the written modality than in the spoken modality. However, only passives showed a clear developmental pattern. The study shows that, given the options of a particular language, the distribution of grammatical constructions is an outcome of communicative purposes – that is, a function of the type of text as perceived by the speaker-writer – in relation to thematic content and perceptions of written language as a discourse style.

The acquisition of spoken forms and written words

The present study examines the complex interactions between the spoken and the written language in twenty Funish children’s oral and written narratives and a read out task. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. First, a comparison of the distribution of the reduction phenomena in the children’s language across the two spoken conditions was made. The second analysis looked at the distribution of spelling errors in the written narratives with respect to sound and reduction related errors both at a general and individual level. Finally, a qualitative analysis of three children’s distribution of the large weak class was performed to evaluate a possible interaction between the children’s three registers: spontaneous speech, reading and writing. The results indicated that (a) there was a significant difference in the distribution of forms across the two spoken modalities, e.g. schwa-assimilations and schwa-drop and Funish forms occurred less in the read out condition than in the spoken narratives; (b) spelling errors were predominately sound related and could be explained as either related to the opaque phoneme to grapheme relation in Danish or to reduction phenomena in the children’s own language; (c) furthermore, there was a significant correlation between spelling errors and a high frequency of reduced forms in the read out condition indicating a close relation between these two modalities.

Form and Function in Introducing Narrative and Expository Texts:A Developmental Perspective

This article considers how children and young people conceptualize and construct different types of texts. The initial parts of narrative and expository texts written by grade-schoolers, adolescents, and adults were analyzed, on the assumption that the opening to a piece of discourse serves as a window on the text as a whole. Analysis was conducted on 3 dimensions: discourse functions—providing background in narratives and introducing the topic in expository texts; organizational pivot—temporality in narratives and generality in expository texts; and linguistic forms—verb tense and semantics in narratives and nominal structure and content in expository texts. The openings to narrative texts emerge as better constructed at an earlier age than in expository texts, but fully proficient openings are a late development in both cases. We attribute this to the fact that, for younger children, the spoken modality and narrative mode of discourse predominate; however, with age and greater literacy, expository discussion increasingly shapes the way people think and give written expression to their thoughts.

Learning War/Learning Race

The tragedy of September 11th produced immense controversy and re-ignited simmering culture wars in the media over the presentation of these events in American schools, or what students should know. The ethnographic research conducted with fourth-grade students in a public school in Brooklyn, New York, side-stepped this debate in order to contribute to it. Specifically, the goal was to capture what children do in fact know through an investigation of their modes of speaking and writing about these events. What figured most prominently in the students’ talk and writing was their racialization of a far-away and ill-defined enemy. By showing how this racialization was also evident in the students’ interactions and friendship, and contextualizing these patterns in the racial (dis)order of the United States, I suggest that the events of September 11th and the war on terrorism have produced a culture of fear that will have lasting, if as yet unintelligible, effects on the racial dynamics of the United States.

The Uses and Abuses of Austen's "Absolute Historical Pictures"

IN 1833, in response to the reissue of Austen’s fictions in Richard Bentley’s series The Standard Novels, the Literary Gazette recommended Austen’s fictions to the “rising generation.” Noting that “one” particular “merit . . . of these delightful works is every hour increasing,” the Gazette continues somewhat ruefully that Austen’s novels are fast “becoming absolute historical pictures.” Were it not for these works, in other words, younger readers “would have no idea of the animation of going down a country dance, or the delights of a tea-table.” The Gazette’s view of history is both quaint and condescending. Implying that Austen’s writings are a repository not just of information but of values that are fast diminishing, the Gazette projects a new readership, whose ignorance of ephemera bespeaks other deficiencies that reading Austen will not remedy so much as underscore. Reading Austen is not simply educative on this view; it is, in its new capacity as popular history, a steady reminder of how far the “rising generation” has already fallen. The Gazette, it turns out, was not very far off base in its assessment. In fact, it is characteristic of the popular pedagogy in which Austen’s fictions were enlisted throughout much of the nineteenth century (and of her fictions’ ability to enshrine an historical moment or heritage) that their most succinct manifestation may be found among a group of readers who, suffice it to say, are as removed from that historical world as one could possibly be. I’m referring, then, to “the Janeites” memorialized by Rudyard Kipling in his fictional vignette bearing that same title. 1 To those for whom the term “Janeite” is a shorthand for the amateur (and sometimes professional) enthusiast who knows Austen’s novels (and their cinematic adaptations) seemingly by heart, not to mention the various sequels to works such as Pride and Prejudice that have been essayed over the years, the “Janeite” enthusiasm that Kipling explores may prove something of a puzzle. For unlike the members of the Jane Austen Society, who are nothing if not blessed with a fair measure of cultural capital, the visibly traumatized veterans of the World War I artillery unit, to whom the sobriquet was first applied, would seem to be the last readers—if indeed they are readers at all—in whom Austen might strike a responsive chord. This is most evident perhaps in the Janeites’ mode of speaking, where cockneyisms and colloquialisms abound to a degree that is not only at odds with the otherwise normative discourse that we associate with Austen’s writing, but at odds to a

Even in adults, written production is still more costly than oral production

The aim of this research is to show that the mechanical demands of writing continue to affect the characteristics of produced texts in adults under certain situations of cognitive overload. The study reported here is intended to demonstrate that the quality of the text produced by educated adults falls when production is performed in the written rather than in the spoken mode, but only when the elements on the basis of which the texts are to be produced are difficult to relate to one another. In this view, we compared performance in a text production span task in either the oral or the written mode. This task consisted of presenting sets of words, semantically linked or not, from which adults had to produce texts including the words in the set. The results showed that neither the production mode nor the extent of the relationship between the items influenced the number of words recalled. By contrast, the number of ideas elaborated and the coherence of the produced texts are lower when the supplied items are difficult to link and when production is in the written mode. These results are interpreted in the framework of capacity theories in production. They suggest that the cost of managing written production is not always negligible in well‐educated adults. When they have to produce texts on the basis of provided elements that are only weakly associated with one another in the written mode, the residual capacity necessary either to maintain and organise the information in working memory, or to adopt a strategic approach to the composition of the texts, is insufficient because the cost of this elaboration must be added to that of the management of the written production.

Religious awe: Potential contributions of negative theology to psychology, "positive" or otherwise.

A hallmark of Christian mysticism is negative theology, which refers to the school of thought that gives prominence to negation in reference to God. By denying the possibility to name God, negative theology cuts at the very root of our cognitive makeup—the human impulse to name and put things into categories—and thereby situates us “halfway between a ‘no longer’ and a ‘not yet’” (Iser, 1978, p. 213), a temporality in which “the past is negated, but . . . the present is not yet formulated” (Iser, 1978, p. 217). The affective corollary of this “no longer” and “not yet” state is the “dark night of the soul” that mystics are known to have bouts of. One particular variant of the “dark night of the soul” is awe, which will be the focus of this paper. My investigation starts with an introduction to the two primary themes of negative theology—negativity and self-reflexivity, followed by a critique of Keltner and Haidt’s model of awe, which is compared with Rudolf Otto’s phenomenology of mysticism in general and religious awe in particular. In the concluding section, I examine the relevance of religious awe to contemporary life on the one hand, and to emotion research on the other. The soul’s greatness takes its measure from its capacity to achieve the flaming vision by which the soul becomes at home in pain. (Heidegger, 1971, p. 18.) Negative theology refers to the school of thought that gives prominence to negation in reference to God. St. Augustine’s statement is a fine example: “God is wise without wisdom, good without goodness, powerful without power” (quoted by Derrida, 1992, p. 113). This mode of thinking and speaking has been a hallmark of Christian mysticism, in which: “Negation is both a means of distinguishing mystical experience from other acts of cognition—“unknowing” from “knowing,” for example—and a corrective to misleading propositions about the being of God” (Lees, 1983, p. 7). How do we understand this “ascendancy of negative over affirmative values” (Lees, 1983, p. 137) in negative theol\\server05\productn\T\THE\22-2\THE204.txt unknown Seq: 2 21-MAR-03 12:52

Guillermo Gomez-Pena: An Introduction

Guillermo Gómez-Peña: An Introduction Lisa Wolford (bio) The keynote address for the 1998 ATHE conference in San Antonio, Texas, had little in common with more conventional modes of academic speaking. Performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña stood on a makeshift stage in a cavernous convention hall. Adopting the persona he identifies as “El Mariachi Liberace,” Gómez-Peña, with his thick mustache and oversized sombrero, embodied the familiar image of the “rrrrrroomantic Mexican” as seen on picture postcards and in tourist brochures. In the spoken word performance he presented for the ATHE delegates, Gómez-Peña alternately deployed and destabilized this image, using humor and irony to guide his audience through the millennial cartography of his “performance universe,” a world in which essentialist notions of identity collapse and geopolitical borders fade in the wake of an irreversible process of cultural hybridization. Whether evoking the specter of a US economy in ruins following the massive migration of Mexican workers to the South, or a nation in which the first Chicano President addresses the country from the Brown House, Gómez-Peña articulated the complex range of tensions and projections, desires and fears, that characterize US/Mexican relations at the end of the twentieth century. Gómez-Peña’s work is characterized by a type of artistic and political strategy that he describes as “reverse anthropology.” Both in his performance texts and his critical writings, Gómez-Peña seeks to appropriate and reverse the direction of the ethnographic gaze, “shifting the notion of center and margins and creating a space for the South to become the speaking subject and the US becoming the object of analysis, adoration, criticism, etc.” To this end, his work explores situations of radical historical, political, and cultural contingency, strategically occupying a mythical center from which he is able to “explain the dominant culture to itself” (Gómez-Peña and Fusco). Moving from the familiar landscape of California under the xenophobic administration of Governor Pete Wilson to a utopian future in which the peoples of the Americas peacefully coexist in a landscape without recognizable borders, Gómez-Peña effectively defamiliarizes and interrogates structural and political inequities in contemporary culture. According to Gómez-Peña, “We assume a fictional center, push the dominant culture to the margins and treat it as exotic and [End Page 89] unfamiliar. So in our performance world, Spanish is the lingua franca, Mexicans are the dominant culture, and Americans are exotic, nomadic minorities” (Border Stasis). Over the past ten years, Gómez-Peña’s writings and performances have been recognized with numerous honors, including a National Book Award (1997), a Bessie Award (1989) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1991). Yet only a small portion of his artistic and political activities have taken place within the confines of the art world. A visionary artist and cultural critic who refuses to let his work be circumscribed within pre-existing categories, Gómez-Peña is as likely to be found performing in community centers or marginally funded alternative arts spaces as in the museums and galleries of Mexico City, New York, and London. Whether working as a commentator for National Public Radio, engaging in street interventions at Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, or organizing performative town meetings in Toledo, Ohio, or Washington, DC, Gómez-Peña epitomizes the role of the artist as citizen diplomat and public intellectual (Giroux x), using performance as a tool to initiate dialogue on a range of complex issues, including censorship, immigration, and Anglo American attitudes toward Latinos and indigenous peoples. In a society in which performance artists are alleged to speak only to a sophisticated, “art world “ audience (see Kester), Gómez-Peña is committed to making art that is politically engaged, theoretically informed, and yet highly accessible, simultaneously addressing multiple constituencies and communities. While he first came to public attention as a solo artist, the majority of Gómez-Peña’s work in recent years has been collaborative in nature. Since 1994, he has worked consistently with interdisciplinary artist Roberto Sifuentes; more recently, choreographer and performer Sara Shelton Mann and soundscape...

Voice timbre in autophonic production compared with that in extraphonic production.

It is well known that voice timbre in autophonic production (hearing one's own voice during phonation) is different from that in extraphonic production (hearing one's voice after recording). The differences between the two productions, however, have not been evaluated quantitatively. This results naturally from the fact that there is no objective way to evaluate the voice timbre in autophonic production. The purpose of the present study was to show a method, named the delayed feedback method created by the author, in which voice timbre in autophonic production can be examined objectively, as a function of frequency, and then to evaluate the timbre in comparison with that in extraphonic production quantitatively, when male subjects phonated five Japanese vowels in the spoken mode. The experiment was conducted so as to simulate the sound through a loudspeaker as accurately as possible in its timbre and loudness to that perceived during phonation. It was found that, for all the vowels, the vocal sound was perceived relatively louder in the low frequency region (about 5 dB at 100 Hz) and softer in the high frequency region (about -5 dB at 4 kHz) than the reproduced sound after recording. This may result from the bone conduction elements during phonation. The findings obtained do also, in fact, coincide with experiences in everyday life.

Understanding variability in speech: A requisite for advances in speech synthesis and recognition

Current systems for speech recognition and synthesis are limited by our incomplete knowledge of the variability in the acoustic properites of speech sounds depending on the context, the speaker, and the mode of speaking. A biproduct of this variability is that there is redundancy in the acoustic correlates of phonetic units, and this redundancy can be used to advantage when speech is modified by noise or other distorting influences. A goal of research in the next decade is to quantify these sources of variability and to incorporate this knowledge into models for speech generation and reception. Variability in the acoustic properties of speech sounds is a consequence of articulatory variability. This process is illustrated with data for place-of-articulation features for stop consonants in English, and with formant data for the vowels /ε/ and /■/. There is systematic variation in the bursts and formant transitions for individual stop consonants across speakers and contexts that can be explained in terms of shapes of cavities anterior and posterior to the consonant constriction. Variability in formants for the vowels can be accounted for by the requirements on the tongue-body position and tongue-body dynamics for the adjacent segments. [Supported in part by NIH Grant DC02978.]