This volume of the series integrates core areas of laboratory phonology with psycholinguistic themes.

The unifying theme of this compilation of current speech science research is the relationship between phonological representations of grammatical structure and physical models of the production and perception of actual utterances.

The present volume contains a selection of the papers and commentaries which were originally presented at the Tenth Conference of Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon10) held in Paris from June 29 to July 1, 2006. The theme of the volume is Variation, Phonetic Detail and Phonological Representation. It brings together specialists of different fields of speech research with the goal to discuss the relevance of patterns of variation and phonetic details on phonological representations and theories. The topic is addressed from the angles of speech production, perception, acquisition, speech disorders, and language universals. The contributions are grouped thematically in five sections, each of which is commented by invited discussants. Section I contains the contributions to the special '10th anniversary session' of the conference which represent in a prototypical way some of the different research questions that have been at the core of important debates over the last 20 years in the laboratory phonology community. Issues of phonological universals and language typology are addressed in section II. In section III, the notions of variation and phonetic detail are examined with regard to how they are acquired and dealt with in the formation of phonological representation in emerging systems. Section IV focuses on recent work at the crossroad between normal and disordered speech.

The central theme of this book is Variation, Phonetic Detail, and Phonological Representation. It brings together specialists of different fields of speech research with the goal to discuss the relevance of linguistic variation from the angles of speech production, perception, pathology and acquisition. As the 10th volume in the Laboratory Phonology series it also includes several review papers that deal with some of the core questions of research in laboratory phonology over the last 20 years.