Throughout the world, there are phoneticians who have been influenced by the teaching, research, and writings of John Laver. Many have worked with him personally, and most of the contributors to this book are people with whom he has had special links or whose involvement represents an appreciation of the breadth of Laver's interests. While the book is meant to be a tribute to John Laver, the topics have been chosen to provide an overview of some key issues in phonetics, with illuminating contributions from some of the most influential academics in the field. Contributing to this festschrift are William Hardcastle, Janet Mackenzie Beck, Peter Ladefoged, John J. Ohala, F. Gibbon, Anne Cutler, Mirjam Broersma, Helen Fraser, Peter F. MacNeilage, Barbara L. Davis, R. E. Asher, E. L. Keane, G. J. Docherty, P. Foulkes, Janet Fletcher, Catherine Watson, John Local, Ailbhe Ni Chasaide, Christer Gobl, John H. Esling, Jimmy G. Harris, and Francis Nolan.

Throughout the world, there are phoneticians who have been influenced by the teaching, research, and writings of John Laver. Many have worked with him personally, and most of the contributors to this book are people with whom he has had special links or whose involvement represents an appreciation of the breadth of Laver's interests. While the book is meant to be a tribute to John Laver, the topics have been chosen to provide an overview of some key issues in phonetics, with illuminating contributions from some of the most influential academics in the field. Contributing to this festschrift are William Hardcastle, Janet Mackenzie Beck, Peter Ladefoged, John J. Ohala, F. Gibbon, Anne Cutler, Mirjam Broersma, Helen Fraser, Peter F. MacNeilage, Barbara L. Davis, R. E. Asher, E. L. Keane, G. J. Docherty, P. Foulkes, Janet Fletcher, Catherine Watson, John Local, Ailbhe Ni Chasaide, Christer Gobl, John H. Esling, Jimmy G. Harris, and Francis Nolan.

The variation that a speech sound undergoes under the influence of neighbouring sounds has acquired the well-established label coarticulation. The phenomenon of coarticulation has become a central problem in the theory of speech production. Much experimental work has been directed towards discovering its characteristics, its extent and its occurrence across different languages. This book is a major study of coarticulation by a team of international researchers. It provides a definitive account of the experimental findings to date, together with discussions of their implications for modelling the process of speech production. Different components of the speech production system (larynx, tongue, jaw, etc.) require different techniques for investigation and a whole section of this book is devoted to a description of the experimental techniques currently used. Other chapters offer a theoretically sophisticated discussion of the implications of coarticulation for the phonology-phonetics interface.

Coarticulation means the overlapping gestures that occur during the pronunciation of any sequence of speech sounds. This topic in the science of phonetics provides a challenge to speech production theory as well as to various projects in the field of speech technology, including that of building a natural sounding speech synthesizer. The eighteen chapters in this book cover the experimental techniques used for investigating the phenomenon, the experimental findings to date, and the theoretical background.