There has been significant progress in speech perception and production research in recent years. Based on contributions by leading experts from all parts of the world, this volume presents and discusses some of the key topics of the research frontier. Themes of the work include research results and future research directions in such areas as phoneme perception, speech individuality and foreign language perception. Also discussed is phoneme production and the linguistic aspects in relation to speech production.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Speech perception: assimilation and contrast in vowel perception, Sumi Shigeno; perception of vowel quality in a phonologically neutralized context, Robert Allen Fox; modelling human vowel identification using aspects of formant trajectory and context, Caroline B. Huang; psychoacoustic evidence for contextual effect models, Masato Akagi; the fuzzy logical model of speech perception - a framework for research and theory, Dominic W. Massaro; the effect of FO on vowel identification, Tatsuya Hirahara and Hiroaki Kato; paying attention to differences among talkers, Howard C. Nusbaum and Todd M. Morin; adaptability to differences between talkers in Japanese monosyllabic perception, Kazuhiko Kakehi; talker normalization in speech perception, David B. Pisoni; perception of American English /r/ and /l/ by native speakers of Japanese, Reiko A. Yamada and Yoh'ichi Tohkura; some effects of training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/, Scott E. Lively et al; learning non-native phoneme contrasts - interactions among subject, stimulus and task variables, Winifred Strange; speech processing and segmentation in Romance languages, Jacques Mehler and Anne Christophe; speech prototypes - studies on the nature, function, ontogeny and phylogeny of the "centre" of speech categories, Patricia K. Kuhl; learning to hear phonetic information, Howard C. Nusbaum and Lisa Lee; processing constraints of the native phonological repertoire on the native language, Anne Cutler; perceptual normalization of vocal tract size in young children and infants, Shigeru Kiritani et al; two mechanisms of processing sound sequences, Morio Kohno. Part 2 Speech production and linguistic structure: what is the input to the speech production mechanism?, John J. Ohala; modelling the process of fundamental frequency contour generation, Hiroya Fujisaki; sensorimotor transformations and control strategies in speech, Kevin G. Munhall et al; articulatory correlates of liguistically contrastive events - where are they?, Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson and Janet Fletcher; intonational categories and the articulatory control of duration, Mary E. Beckman and Jan Edwards; perceptual vs physical models of intonation, Rene Collier; FO lowering - peripheral mechanisms and motor programming, Kiyoshi Honda; the control of segmental duration in speech synthesis using statistical methods, Nobuyoshi Kaiki and Yoshinori Sagisaka; segmental elasticity and timing in Japanese speech, Nick Campbell; the production and perception of word boundaries, Anne Cutler; syntactic influences on prosody, Jacques Terken and Rene Collier; to what extent is speech production controlled by speech perception? some questions and some experimental evidence, Sieb G. Nooteboom and Wieke Eefting; on the modelling of segmental duration control, Yoshinori Sagisaka; evidence for speech rythms across languages, Mary E. Beckman.