This volume contains studies presented at the 4th International Workshop on the History of Speech Communication Research (HSCR 2021). The series of workshops was initiated in Dresden in 2015. The current workshop took place in Prague at the Institute of Phonetics, Charles University, amid the ever-changing pandemic circumstances – for the first time in a hybrid form. There are nine contributions, written by 12 authors from six countries. The contributions analyze the contextual background of particular personalities or investigate how specific research practices developed over time. Moreover, each contribution demonstrates a significant connection between various aspects of speech communication research and the wider social context. A special theme of this workshop was the link in linguistic signs between the form (sound) and the meaning (sense). The phonetic endeavour was often claimed to concern only the form, while meaning was delegated to someone else. This is not only one-sided, but also difficult to integrate into the large body of scientific knowledge, as the opening keynote emphasized.

The international workshop on the "History Speech Communication Research" is organised by the Special Interest Group (SIG) on "The History of Speech Communication Sciences." This SIG is supported by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). The workshop offers an exchange forum for researchers with work on all kind of historical aspects of the research fields represented at the Interspeech conferences and the Congresses of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS). This volume includes the proceedings of the first workshop of this series, held in Dresden as a satellite event of Interspeech 2015. The re-opening of the historical acoustic-phonetic collection (HAPS) in new rooms was part of the workshop. With the Barkhausen building on the first day of the workshop and the technical collections of the city of Dresden in the historical Ernemann building on day two of the workshop, the meeting had appropriate locations. The proceedings volume contains 18 contributions, including the general presentations of the opening session as well as the papers from the dedicated sessions on "mechanical speech synthesis," "collections," and "pioneering work in phonetics." The papers are written from 23 authors, coming from nine countries.

The monograph Prosodic Phrase in Spoken Czech provides a missing source of information on a crucial element in the sound structure of the Czech language: the prosodic phrase. The introductory chapters offer a concise lead-in even to non-specialists: they explain the nature and typical approaches to speech prosody and offer an overview of the commonly used hierarchy of prosodic units. The core of the study is based on speech material that was produced with legitimate communicative intents: storytelling, newsreading and poetry reciting. Prosodic phrases in the given material are described in terms of their phonetic structure, acoustic properties, and a specific syntactic issue. Moreover, the perceptual importance of prosodic phrasing is discussed together with a presentation of original perception experiments. A short chapter is dedicated to automatic detection of prosodic breaks by artificial neural networks. Apart from interesting facts about a core unit of prosodic structure, the prosodic phrase, the book can serve as a source of data in designing further experiments with natural language.

A Dutch policy scientist once said the information and knowledge in the twenty-first century has the shelf life of fresh fish, and learning in this age often means learning where and how to find something and how to relate it to a specific situation instead of knowing everything one needs to know. On top of this, the world has become so highly interconnected that we have come to realise that every decision that we make can have repercussions somewhere else. To touch as many bases as possible, we need to work with knowledgeable others from different fields (multiple agents) and take heed of their points of view (multiple representations). To do this, we make increasing use of computers and computer-mediated communication. If computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is not simply a newly discovered hype in education, what is it and why are we writing a book about it? Dissecting the phrase into its constituent parts, we see that first of all CSCL is about learning, and in the twenty-first century this usually means constructivist learning.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Dialogue is the first comprehensive overview of the emerging and rapidly growing sub-discipline in linguistics, Language and Dialogue. Edited by one of the top scholars in the field, Edda Weigand, and comprising contributions written by a variety of likewise influential figures, the handbook aims to describe the history of modern linguistics as reasoned progress leading from de Saussure and the simplicity of artificial terms to the complexity of human action and behaviour, which is based on the integration of human abilities such as speaking, thinking, perceiving, and having emotions. The book is divided into three sections: the first focuses on the history of modern linguistics and related disciplines; the second part focuses on the core issues and open debates in the field of Language and Dialogue and introduces the arguments pro and contra certain positions; and the third section focuses on the three components that fundamentally affect language use: human nature, institutions, and culture. This handbook is the ideal resource for those interested in the relationship between Language and Dialogue, and will be of use to students and researchers in Linguistics and related fields such as Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics, and Communication.

The Routledge Handbook of Phonetics provides a comprehensive and up-to-date compilation of research, history and techniques in phonetics. With contributions from 41 prominent authors from North America, Europe, Australia and Japan, and including over 130 figures to illustrate key points, this handbook covers all the most important areas in the field, including: • the history and scope of techniques used, including speech synthesis, vocal tract imaging techniques, and obtaining information on under-researched languages from language archives; • the physiological bases of speech and hearing, including auditory, articulatory, and neural explanations of hearing, speech, and language processes; • theories and models of speech perception and production related to the processing of consonants, vowels, prosody, tone, and intonation; • linguistic phonetics, with discussions of the phonetics-phonology interface, sound change, second language acquisition, sociophonetics, and second language teaching research; • applications and extensions, including phonetics and gender, clinical phonetics, and forensic phonetics. The Routledge Handbook of Phonetics will be indispensable reading for students and practitioners in the fields of speech, language, linguistics and hearing sciences.