Flege has had a wide-reaching impact on the study of second language (L2) speech. Prior to his early work in the 1980s, very few acoustic studies had been conducted on L2 speech. Since then, Flege has compiled a large body of research employing rigorous empirical acoustic analyses focusing on the perception and production of L2 speech. Because much of his work has been published in journals not widely read by most SLA specialists, Flege is probably not a household name in many SLA circles, although he is very well known by phoneticians, speech and hearing researchers, and SLA phoneticians and phonologists. He is best known for his speech learning model (Flege, Reference Flege and Strange1995) and subsequent work relating to this model.

This festschrift in honor of Flege's retirement is composed of research principally related to Flege's prolific body of work and issues that have emerged from it. Similar to Flege's research, the focus of this volume is more phonetic than phonological. In the tradition of phoneticians, the authors often refer to talkers, rather than speakers, phones rather than phonemes, and phonetic rather than phonological categories and units. Although not a criticism, the lack of a phonological focus is apparent by the absence of authors in L2 phonology.

The 20-chapter volume with its 30 authors (most of whom are well known in L2 speech research) is divided into five sections: “The Nature of L2 Speech Learning,” “The Concept of Foreign Accent,” “Consonants and Vowels,” “Beyond Consonants and Vowels” (prosody), and “Emerging Issues.” The vast majority of the chapters are original empirical studies that could be easily placed in top-notch SLA and phonetic journals. This volume should be of interest to anyone interested in the rigorous fine-grained analysis of L2 speech, from segmental to prosodic levels. One nice feature of this volume, similar to journal articles, is that each chapter has an abstract, a feature often neglected in many edited volumes. There is also a convenient name and subject index. However, there is no list of references for each chapter; instead, there is a master list at the end of the volume, making it impossible to know the references in a given chapter without perusing the whole chapter.

I will limit my specific comments to two chapters that I believe have important implications for L2 speech research. The chapter by Piske claims that Flege's research suggests four factors that can help students in foreign language classrooms: (a) early starting age, (b) intensive use of the language over many years, (c) high quality input, and (d) training in perception and production of L2 sounds. Because these and other factors that Flege has investigated are thought to be common knowledge, some armchair linguists might find many of Flege's studies unexciting. Yet, too often, many common assumptions about speech have neither been tested nor explicated in detail. However, Flege has tested many common assumptions and provided us with important facts about L2 speech, not hunches or assumptions. Throughout his career he has also encouraged others to investigate specifics. About 20 years ago, while working in Flege's lab, I mentioned that I had some recordings from which I could determine correlations between voice onset times and global foreign accent. I was reluctant to do this because I thought it would be an exercise in the obvious, but Flege encouraged me, pointing out that even if the results turned out as expected, at least we would now have empirical evidence. Subsequently, I did conduct such analyses and published the results. (These factors were indeed correlated; Major, Reference Major1987).

Port's chapter on the graphical basis of sounds is provocative because it argues that the segment is probably not an important psychological unit of language but rather the result of alphabetic writing. His claim is contrary to a long tradition in linguistics (cf. Sapir's, 1933/Reference Sapir and Mandelbaum1949, psychological reality of phonemes). It is thus possible that literacy has shaped our theoretical frameworks because the segment has been a pervasive unit both in the analysis and teaching of speech. It would be interesting to speculate what linguistic units might exist today if phonetics and phonology had evolved largely from linguists who did not speak languages with alphabetic writing systems.