The chapters in this book were originally papers presented at the third Phonetics and Phonology in Iberia conference, which took place at the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal in 2007. Altogether, there are thirteen chapters, with an average length of twenty pages. Five of them deal with languages in Spain (Castilian Spanish and Catalan), two deal with dialects of Italian, and others focus on American English, Romanian, Dutch, and Brazilian Portuguese, while two chapters provide an overview of issues such as the alignment of gestures by children and the realisation of nasality in a range of different languages. They are presented in three parts: ‘Between phonetics and phonology’, ‘Segmental and prosodic interactions’, and ‘Interactions between segments and features’.

There are five chapters in Part I, all but the first dealing with the phonetic effects of contrastive focus. In the first chapter, María Riera, Joaquín Romero & Ben Parrell analyse the schwa that tends to occur before final /r/ in American English. They use spectrographic measurements of formant frequency and also duration to investigate if this schwa should be regarded as a result of coarticulation (a phonetic process) or insertion (a phonological process), and they conclude that it is so extensively influenced by the quality of the preceding vowel that it must be coarticulation. The second and third chapters are both by Marta Ortega-Llebaria & Pilar Prieto, and they investigate the effects of varying intensity, duration and spectral tilt on the perception of stress in mama vs. mamá and also mimi vs. mimí in Castilian Spanish as well as Catalan. They report that, in Castilian Spanish, duration has the greatest influence on [a], but intensity is more important for [i], while spectral tilt has little effect on either of them, and for Catalan the results are highly speaker-dependent, with some speakers, but not all, showing a substantial truncation of the prosodic contour when the stressed syllable with narrow focus occurs in utterance-final position. In the fourth chapter, Alis Manolescu, Don Olson & Marta Ortega-Llebaria measure the pitch range, pitch alignment and vowel duration of syllables in bisyllabic words with initial and final stress in early, medial and final position in Romanian declaratives spoken with broad focus and contrastive stress. The authors report that pitch range is most important in identifying the focal syllable and that pitch alignment also has a role, particularly for words with initial stress, but vowel duration has less of a role. In the final chapter of Part I, Aoju Chen investigates noun phrases in contrastive focus compared with those simply functioning as the topic in Dutch declaratives produced by adults and children and reports that adults have lower f0 and earlier pitch alignment for contrastive focus tokens, children aged 7 and 8 have a similar distinction in f0 falls but no difference in pitch alignment, and children aged 4 and 5 produce no distinction between contrastive focus and topicalisation.

There are four chapters in Part II. In the first, Timothy Arbisi-Kelm & Mary Beckman investigate the production by children aged between 2 and 5 of isolated words and non-words in Cantonese, English, Greek and Japanese to see what disfluencies in trying to say these words tell us about the alignment of the various gestures in these different languages. In the second chapter, Laurence White, Elinor Payne & Sven Mattys compare the rhythm of Venetan Italian with Sicilian Italian, as the former has been described as more stress-timed than the latter. They report that traditional rhythmic metrics (such as VarcoV and %V) are unable to separate out these two varieties, but other measures, particularly a comparison of the duration of stressed and unstressed syllables as well as the degree of vowel reduction, are more successful in showing a substantial distinction between them. The third chapter, by Teresa Cabré & Maria Ohannesian, describes the complicated rules for stress assignment and realisation of high vowels in Spanish derivational verbs and nouns and proposes a unified Optimality Theory analysis of the constraints involved. In the final chapter of Part II, Benjamin Schmeiser investigates the insertion of a schwa in sequences of a tap followed by a consonant in six varieties of Spanish, and he reports that the vowel is longer across a word boundary than within a word, and also in heterosyllabic than tautosyllabic sequences.

Part III has four chapters. In the first, which has 30 pages and is the longest in the book, Maria-Josep Solé reviews data on nasal consonants occurring before and after consonants in a range of languages and concludes that the widespread preference for nasals to co-occur with voiced rather than voiceless stops arises not just for acoustic-auditory reasons but also as an articulatory mechanism to lower the pressure in the oral cavity and thereby facilitate the maintenance of voicing. The second chapter, with just 12 pages, is the shortest in the book. In it, Elisa Battisti & Ben Hermans analyse palatalisation following dental stops before high vowels in the Portuguese spoken in the southern Brazilian city of António Prado, and they report that this palatalisation is less common than in other varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, suggesting that this is because of the influence of Italian immigrants in the region. In the third chapter, Stefano Canalis uses a feature geometry framework to model right-to-left vowel harmony in some dialects of Central Italy in which harmony is blocked by all consonants except the liquids /l/ and /r/. In the final chapter of the book, Teresa Cabré accounts for vowel harmony in the phonology of loanwords in Catalan using an Optimality Theory approach, proposing at least three different categories of new words to account for varying degrees of right-to-left harmony of the [ATR] feature for mid vowels: learned words, loan words, and unassimilated newly-created words.

As is perhaps inevitable for a collection of papers originating from a conference, there is a wide range of material in this book with not much of a common theme to link the various chapters. One theme that crops up quite often is the link between phonetics and phonology, especially in Part III, where most of the chapters try to explain phonetic patterns using phonological models. However, there is sometimes a problem here: in accurately accounting for acoustic and auditory phenomena, phonetics usually reports substantial probabilistic variation for the occurrence of features, while models of phonology tend to be more deterministic, suggesting a single target pronunciation for a word or phrase. This can represent a conundrum: how do you represent variability in a framework such as Optimality Theory, under which the ranking of the constraints generally results in a single target being output? Battisti & Hermans suggest (p. 243) that one solution would be to have unranked constraints, so for example three such unranked constraints could produce figures of one-third of mid vowels being devoiced while two-thirds are voiced, but they then admit (p. 244) that at least two further constraints would be needed to represent a feature of pronunciation such as palatalisation, which occurs in just 13% of cases in Portuguese Brazilian. Indeed, this seems to be something of a fudge, and the obvious conclusion is that it is rather hard to represent the fine detail that is always found in phonetic data by means of frameworks such as Optimality Theory. And despite the careful attempt by Cabré & Ohannesian to use Optimality Theory to explain boundary effects in Spanish, one is left wondering if the outputs of the various tableaux accurately reflect the complexity of realisation that would inevitably be found among a range of different speakers, or whether in fact a probabilistic model is needed. And it is not clear if other frameworks fare much better, such as the use by Canalis to represent vowel harmony in the dialects of Central Italy by means of feature geometry and metrical grids.

Despite the general lack of a common theme, there is lots of fascinating material in this book, most of which is carefully presented in substantial detail. Perhaps inevitably with so much detailed material, the explanation in a few places is not entirely clear, and there might have been some more elaboration about some complex issues. For example: on page 77, Figure 2 illustrating the analysis of Romanian appears to show the rhyme duration for vin in mama vinde ‘mother sells’ extending to include the following [d], so some further explanation of the measurements of the rhyme would have helped; on page 112, the up and down arrows showing gestures for the lips, tongue and glottis gestures for apple, applause and pleas left me totally perplexed (partly because the labels at the top such as [ʔ[æ]_v]_σ[p[l]_v]_σ]_F]_ω are poorly aligned); and on page 166, it is stated that, for assignment of stress in Spanish, ‘if a word ends in a terminal element or epenthesis it will be paroxytone’, but ‘if the word lacks these elements, it will be oxytone’, and mádre and hindú are offered as examples of these two classes of words, but I fail to see why mádre fits into the first category while hindú is the second. Some elaboration about what a ‘terminal element’ is would have helped.

Occasionally, it is not just lack of explanation, but there seems to be something wrong in the text. For example: on page 78, in the analysis of Romanian stress, in the description of the data from Figure 4 it is stated that ‘when word 1 is in contrastive focus, its pitch range is 58 Hz larger than the pitch range of the same word in broad focus’, while Figure 4 seems to show values of about 100 Hz and 70 Hz for these two conditions; on page 79, ‘pre-focal contexts’ are defined as ‘those constituents immediately following the contrastive focus elements’, and presumably that should be ‘preceding’ rather than ‘following’; on page 131, the discussion of deletion of the vowel by a child in the first syllable of the Greek target form /d iˈs a m o n i s/ seems to suggest that this involves the lenition of a low vowel, while /i/ is surely a high vowel; on page 148, it is stated that ‘stressed vowels were 33 ms longer in Venetan than in Sicilian Italian’, but Table 3 gives values of 95 ms and 72 ms for these two varieties; on page 261, it is suggested that in the dialects of Central Italy, vowel harmony ‘takes place only between liquid consonants’, and presumably this should be ‘across’ liquid consonants, not between them; and on page 218, it is stated that, in Figure 3, the nasal flow preceding the stop begins ‘halfway through the segment when the oral pressure starts to rise’, but the data from Figure 3 seem to suggest that nasal flow actually decreases as the oral pressure builds up.

While it might seem churlish to list flaws such as these when so much excellent data is presented in such detail, the density of the presentation of the material can be quite high, particularly with the exact phonological rules for vowel harmony in Italian dialects, stress assignment in Spanish, and the phonology of new words in Catalonian, so it is a pity that the text is a bit flawed in places, and also that some of the phonological analysis which is suggested does not seem to tally too well with the details of acoustic measurement and phonetic description. Overall, there is lots of valuable data that is carefully described and analysed, and the book represents a handsome source of material that substantially enhances our knowledge about the phonetics and phonology of a range of languages, even if there are occasional flaws in the text.