Most of the chapters discuss formalizations of the speech perception process that involve ranked phonological constraints. Theoretical frameworks argued for are Natural Phonology, Optimality Theory, and the Neigbourhood Activation Model. The book discusses the perception of segments, stress, and intonation in the fields of loanword adaptation, second language acquisition, and sound change.
The book is of interest to phonologists, phoneticians and psycholinguists working on the phonetics-phonology interface, and to everybody who is interested in the idea that phonology is not production alone.
Paul Boersma, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Silke Hamann, University of Düsseldorf, Germany.