One of a series of semi-annual reports, this publication contains 23 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles are as follows: "Phonological and Articulatory Characteristics of Spoken Language" (Carol A. Fowler); "Characteristics of Speech as a Motor Control System" (Vincent L. Gracco); "Sensorimotor Mechanisms in Speech Motor Control" (Vincent L. Gracco); "Analysis of Speech Movements: Practical Considerations and Clinical Application" (Vincent L. Gracco); "Reiterant Speech as a Test of Nonnative Speakers' Mastery of the Timing of French" (Andrea G. Levitt); "Syllable-Internal Structure and the Sonority Hierarchy: Differential Evidence from Lexical Decision, Naming, and Reading" (Andrea Levitt and others); "Effects of Phonological and Phonetic Factors on Cross-Language Perception" (Catherine T. Best and Winifred Strange); "Plausibility, Parsimony, and Theories of Speech" (Alvin M. Liberman); "The Relation of Speech to Reading and Writing" (Alvin M. Liberman); "Linguistic Awareness and Orthographic Form" (Ignatius G. Mattingly); "The Effects of Aging and First Grade School on the Development of Phonological Awareness" (Shlomo Bentin and others); "Bi-Alphabetism and the Design of a Reading Mechanism" (Laurie Beth Feldman); "Morphological Analysis of Disrupted Morphemes: Evidence from Hebrew" (Laurie Beth Feldman and Shlomo Bentin); "Phonetic Recoding of Print and Its Effect on the Detection of Concurrent Speech in Amplitude Modulated Noise" (Ram Frost); "Processing Phonological and Semantic Ambiguity: Evidence from Semantic Priming at Different SOAs" (Ram Frost and Shlomo Bentin); "Attention Mechanisms Mediate the Syntactic Priming Effect in Auditory Identification" (Avital Deutsch and Shlomo Bentin); "Starting on the Right Foot: A Review of Marilyn Jager Adams''Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print'" (Donald Shankweiler); "Null Subject vs. Null Object: Some Evidence from the Acquisition of Chinese and English" (Qi Wang and others); "Amplitude as a Cue to Word-Initial Consonant Length: Pattani Malay" (Arthur S. Abramson); "Tone Splits and Voicing Shifts in Thai: Phonetic Plausibility" (Arthur S. Abramson and Donna M. Erickson); "A Constraint on the Expressive Timing of a Melodic Gesture: Evidence from Performance and Aesthetic Judgment" (Bruno H. Repp); "A Review of Carol L. Krumhansl's 'Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch'" (Bruno H. Repp); and "Toward an Emancipation of the 'Weaker Sense'" (Bruno H. Repp). (RS)