Research reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for the investigation of speech, and practical applications of speech research are presented in this status report. The 18 reports deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) cyclic production of vowels in sequences of monosyllabic stress feet; (2) differences between phonetic and auditory modes of perception; (3) duplex perception; (4) the kinematics of articulatory control as a function of stress and rate; (5) simultaneous neuromuscular, movement, and acoustic measures of speech articulation; (6) the relation between pronunciation and recognition of printed words in deep and shallow orthographies; (7) how subcategorical phonetic mismatches slow phonetic judgments; (8) motor memory; (9) inadequacies of the computer metaphor; (10) perceptual integration of spectral and temporal cues for stop consonant place of articulation; (11) acoustic laryngeal reaction time; (12) old problems and new directions in motor behavior; and (13) discovering the sound pattern of a language. (FL)