There is currently a wealth of activity involving the analysis of complex segmental sequences from phonetic, phonological and psycholinguistic perspectives. This volume draws from selected contributions to the conference Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity held in Munich in August 2008. Consonant sequences, whether occurring within individual lexical items or emerging in running speech at word boundaries, give particularly striking evidence for the temporal complexity of human speech. But contributions also consider the integration of tonal and vocalic elements into syllable structure. The main aim of the volume is to do justice to this complexity by bringing together researchers from a wide range of backgrounds. The book is organized into four main sections entitled 'Phonology and Typology', 'Production: Analysis and Models', 'Acquisition', and 'Assimilation and reduction in connected speech'.

Prosody is strongly influenced by situational variation along conceptional parameters, such as the degree of communicative collaboration, the degree of dialogicity, the degree of planning, or the degree of familiarity between partners. Prosodic research, however, still focuses more on decontextualized "prosodic grammars" than on prosodic variation itself. This book, which gathers contributions from the "Prosody and conceptional variation" panel at the Deutscher Romanistentag held in 2017 in Zurich, tackles methodological and theoretical issues of this interplay. Based on empirical analysis of a wide range of communicative situations, the book shows how phonetic, pragmatic, textual, and interactional perspectives can help to better understand how prosodic features and communicative settings are interrelated.