One of the basic grammatical categories in linguistics is the phonological word. But how are words made up in terms of their sounds? And how is the information on the sound structure of words used in the processing of words? The multidimensionality of the phonological word relates it to semantics, morphology, phonology and syntax. It is nevertheless a category that has only been an object of serious study since the prosodic turn in phonology and thus cannot be considered an established category of grammatical description. This volume brings together scholars interested in the complex relations of the phonological word, applying different empirical approaches.

This book explores the interaction of grammatical components in a wide variety of languages, and presents and exemplifies new experimental and analytic techniques for studying linguistic interfaces. Speaking a language requires access to the different aspects of its grammar -- semantic, syntactic, phonological, pragmatic, morphological, and phonetic. Knowing how these interact is crucial to understanding the operations of any specific language and to the explanation of how language in general operates in the mind. The new research presented here combines theoretical and experimental perspectives on one of the most productive fields in contemporary linguistics.
After the editors' introduction the volume is organized along four themes: the structural properties of sentences interfacing with meaning and the lexicon; internal word structure and its effect on the syntactic and phonological components; the syntax-phonology interface and its relation to the phonetics-phonology interface; and the implications of interfaces for language acquisition and language processing. The book will interest theoretical linguists and all those in linguistics and cognitive science working on the mental operations of language.