Where speech sounds meet the architecture of the grammar and beyond

It has been over 30 years since the first Laboratory Phonology conference was launched in 1987
in the vanguard of exploring the linguistically meaningful relationship between the grammar and
physics of speech. Since then, we have witnessed the gradual erosion of the severance between
phonetics and phonology, accompanied by an increased awareness of the importance of scalar and
gradient aspects of speech in understanding the linguistic sound system. We have also seen a
wealth of investigation into the linguistic roles of fine phonetic detail, which provides insights into
the phonetic underpinnings of other speech variation phenomena. It has now become the norm in
the laboratory phonology tradition to view the phonetic encoding-decoding process as intricately
intertwined not only with phonology but also with various other components (e.g., morphology,
syntax and semantics) in the architecture of the grammar. Moreover, in parallel with the
exploration of these relationships, laboratory studies of speech variation have also shown that
phonetic and phonological forms can be shaped further by both information structure and
pragmatic and social contexts.

The fundamental assumption that underlies the proposed theme is that in order for the language
user to deliver a message successfully, the user must encode the message in phonetic forms that
reflect other linguistic and extra-linguistic structures. The message receiver must then in turn
exploit the resulting fine phonetic detail in decoding the intended message in reference to the
higher-order structural information that underlies the signal. Thus the laboratory phonology
community is now challenged with a fundamental question of how the fine phonetic detail and its
systematic interaction with higher-order structures that may go even beyond the traditional realm
of linguistics should be reflected in the architecture of the grammars of spoken languages.

At the LabPhon 19 conference, we aimed to create an international scholarly venue at which to
tackle these issues, narrowing them down to specific topics in five thematic sessions, as
outlined below. This special issue is primarily based on these themes, and the
contributions herein were solicited primarily by invitation to the authors of thematic papers presented
at the conference.

Editors: Jeffrey Holliday (Guest Editor), Sahyang Kim (Guest Editor), Sang-Im Lee-Kim (Guest Editor), Taehong Cho (Guest Editor)