1. INTRODUCTION The term 'laboratory phonology' was invented more than a decade ago as the name of an interdisciplinary conference series, and all three of us have co-organized laboratory phonology conferences. Since then, the term has come into use not only for the conference series itself, but for the research activities exemplified by work presented there. In this paper, we give our own pers...

Phonology is the study of sound patterns of the world’s languages. In all spoken languages, we find sound patterns characterizing the composition of words and phrases. These patterns include overall properties of contrastive sound inventories (e.g. vowel inventories, consonant inventories, tone inventories), as well as patterns determining the distribution of sounds or contrastive features of s...

The control of sequenced behaviors, including human speech, requires that the brain coordinate the production of discrete motor elements with their concatenation into complex patterns. In birdsong, another sequential vocal behavior, the acoustic structure (phonology) of individual song elements, or "syllables," must be coordinated with the sequencing of syllables into a song. However, it is unk...

This paper discusses articulatory phonology and task dynamics as potentially computationally adequate models which, together, might characterise speech production. The idea is introduced that, particularly at the task dynamic level, the object oriented computational paradigm is appropriate — this is a novel approach in speech production modelling. The paper concludes that articulatory phonology...

What is phonological encoding? An introductory answer to this question may be helpful for a discussion of the papers in the present section. The term 'phonological encoding' has multiple uses, as Pat Keating signaled during the meeting from which this book stems in her introductory presentation: it can denote the encoding by phonology or the encoding of phonology. In the reading literature, for...

The derivational view of phonetics-phonology (Ladd, this volume) expresses an intuition that seems valid, namely, that there is a distinction to be made between quantitative and qualitative aspects of phonetics-phonology. Incomplete neutralization (Ernestus and Baayen, this volume) and other phenomena like it indicate that the specific way of drawing that distinction is too rigid. At the same t...

Selective attention to phonology, i.e., the ability to attend to sub-syllabic units within spoken words, is a critical precursor to literacy acquisition. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence has demonstrated that a left-lateralized network of frontal, temporal, and posterior language regions, including the visual word form area, supports this skill. The current event-related po...

When phonological rules are regarded as declarative descriptions, it is possible to construct a model of phonology in which rules and representations are no longer distinguished and such procedural devices as rule-ordering are absent. In this paper we present a finite-state model of phonology in which automata are the descriptions and tapes (or strings) are the objects being described. This pro...

Phonology provides a system by which a limited number of types of phonetic variation can signal communicative intentions at multiple levels of linguistic analysis. Because phonologies vary from language to language, acquiring the phonology of a language demands learning to attribute phonetic variation appropriately. Here, we studied the case of pitch-contour variation. In English, pitch contour...

Phonology provides a system by which a limited number of types of phonetic variation can signal communicative intentions at multiple levels of linguistic analysis. Because phonologies vary from language to language, acquiring the phonology of a language demands learning to attribute phonetic variation appropriately. Here, we studied the case of pitch-contour variation. In English, pitch contour...