One of a series of quarterly reports, this publication contains 14 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles in the publication are: "Some Assumptions about Speech and How They Changed" (Alvin M. Liberman); "On the Intonation of Sinusoidal Sentences: Contour and Pitch Height" (Robert E. Remez and Philip E. Rubin); "The Acquisition of Prosody: Evidence from French- and English-Learning Infants" (Andrea G. Levitt); "Dynamics and Articulatory Phonology" (Catherine P. Browman and Louis Goldstein); "Some Organizational Characteristics of Speech Movement Control" (Vincent L. Gracco); "The Quasi-Steady Approximation in Speech Production" (Richard S. McGowan); "Implementing a Genetic Algorithm to Recover Task-Dynamic Parameters of an Articulatory Speech Synthesizer" (Richard S. McGowan); "An MRI-Based Study of Pharyngeal Volume Contrasts in Akan" (Mark K. Tiede); "Thai" (M. R. Kalaya Tingsabadh and Arthur S. Abramson); "On the Relations between Learning to Spell and Learning to Read" (Donald Shankweiler and Eric Lundquist); "Word Superiority in Chinese" (Ignatious G. Mattingly and Yi Xu); "Prelexical and Postlexical Strategies in Reading: Evidence from a Deep and a Shallow Orthography" (Ram Frost); "Relational Invariance of Expressive Microstructure across Global Tempo Changes in Music Performance: An Exploratory Study" (Bruno H. Repp); and "A Review of 'Psycholinguistic Implications for Linguistic Relativity: A Case Study of Chinese' by Rumjahn Hoosain" (Yi Xu). (RS)