Book Reviews: Papers in Laboratory Phonology I: Between the Grammar and Physics of Speech

Papers in Laboratory Phonology I, edited by John Kingston and Mary E. Beckman, contains 27 revised versions of papers and commentaries presented at the First Conference in Laboratory Phonology, held in June 1987. The editors lead off with an excellent introduction, including discussion of the motivation for the conference, explanation of its multi-disciplinary nature, and summarizations of the contributions, showing their relations both to one another and to the structure of the conference as a whole. From the point of view of many researchers in general natural language processing, much of the background assumed and many of the questions addressed are likely to seem somewhat arcane. Nevertheless, the book is valuable on two counts: first, as an (admittedly sophisticated) overview of current practical and theoretical concerns in phonetics and phonology; and second, as an exemplary effort to integrate perspectives from radically differing "scientific subcultures" (i.e., phonetics and phonology). Traditionally, phonology has concerned itself with symbolic representations of cognitive primitives and processes that are manipulated by native speakers and hearers in conjunction with grammatical systems, while phonetics has devoted itself to instrumental analysis of the articulatory organs and the speech signal. The conference and this book are landmark efforts in attempting to reconcile these intellectual streams and lay the foundations for a unified theory of speech production and perception. As neighboring subdisciplines in all areas of NLP bring themselves into ever greater proximity by virtue of their own progress, general and methodological issues such as those addressed in this work become ever more pressing, and will require constant attention and evaluation.