Alice Turk and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel (2020). Speech timing: implications for theories of phonology, phonetics, and speech motor control. (Oxford Studies in Phonology and Phonetics 5.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xv + 370.

Abstract

There is increasing awareness that the temporal dimension of speech, in particular the relative timing of speech movements, contains rich information about phonological structure. Relating abstract phonological structure to the temporal unfolding of realistically variable speech data remains a major interdisciplinary challenge. It is this challenge that is taken up in Speech timing: implications for theories of phonology, phonetics, and speech motor control, henceforth Speech timing. The book has eleven chapters, including a short introduction and a conclusion. The main proposal – a sketch of a model mapping phonological representations to continuous movements of articulators – comes in the second half of the book, particularly in Chapters 7 and 10. The second half also includes chapters on optimisation (Ch. 8: ‘Optimization’) and general mechanisms for timing (Ch. 9: ‘How do timing mechanisms work?’). These provide a unique synthesis of speech and nonspeech literature, which is highly accessible for linguists, and serves to motivate aspects of the main proposal. The first half of the book provides a description and critique of the theory of Articulatory Phonology, developed in the Task Dynamics framework (AP/TD) (e.g. Browman & Goldstein 1986, Saltzman & Munhall 1989). On the view of the authors: