After a short 10-page introductory chapter by the editor, this book is divided into five parts, each with four or five chapters. The average length of the chapters is 24 pages, with the shortest (Chapter 18) being 15 pages, and the longest (Chapter 14) 33 pages. The coverage moves from concrete to abstract, so the first part is about the physical speech mechanism, and then subsequent parts deal with coordination and multimodal speech, speech motor control, and sequencing and planning, before the final part is concerned with language factors. One other guiding principle is that material on developmental as well as disordered speech is interleaved with that describing ordinary adult speech, in the belief that children's development and the patterns of speech under conditions such as Parkinson's disease offer valuable insights into the way that all speech is organised and processed.

Part 1, which considers the speech mechanism, has five chapters. In Chapter 2, Jessica Huber & Elaine Stathopoulos describe how changes in the respiratory system affect speech as we get older and also for patients with Parkinson's disease. Chapter 3, by Brad Story, deals with the structure of the larynx and the vibration of the vocal folds in generating the acoustic waveform, including the use of computer models to represent the motion of the vocal folds. In Chapter 4, Kiyoshi Honda outlines the muscles in the tongue and discusses models of the vocal tract that generate the acoustic patterns of speech. In Chapter 5, Pascal Van Lieshout describes the anatomy of the jaw and lips, including the bones, the blood supply and the nerves that control them and enable us to chew, swallow and speak. In Chapter 6, David Zajac analyses the velopharyngeal function in speech production, overviewing intrusive and non-intrusive methods of investigation, outlining development through the lifetime of speakers, and summarising dysfunctional issues, especially regarding cleft palates.

Part II is concerned with coordination and multimodal speech, and it contains four chapters. In Chapter 7, Philip Hoole & Marianne Pouplier provide an overview of coordination between articulators, both for segments such as [w] that involve two articulators and also for sequences of two segments such as [kl], and they discuss laryngeal-oral coordination as well as coordination that has been observed the between supraglottal articulators. In Chapter 8, Fred Cummins discusses the rhythm of speech, summarising efforts to categorise languages as stress-timed, syllable-timed and mora-timed and also describing rhythmic disfluencies such as stuttering. In Chapter 9, Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson & Kevin Munhall deal with audio-visual speech processing, emphasising that our current understanding of the ways that auditory and visual input is coordinated in speech perception merely scratches the surface of the issue. Chapter 10 is by Lucie Ménard, and it provides an overview of the interaction of speech production with visual and auditory perception, including the issues faced by deaf and blind children in learning to speak.

Part III, on speech motor control, has five chapters. In Chapter 11, Pascal Perrier & Susanne Fuchs describe motor equivalence in speech, for example reviewing the findings of bite-block experiments. Chapter 12 is by Takayuki Ito, and it deals with feedback from sensors in the skin, particularly in the region around the lips where there are dense patterns of sensors. Chapter 13, by John Houde & Srikantan Nagarajan, provides an overview of the contribution of auditory feedback to speech production, including a discussion of how articulation deals with altered auditory feedback and also a brief review of current models of neural processing of auditory data. The final two chapters in Part III both deal with disordered speech. In Chapter 14, Gary Weismer & Jordan Green discuss speech production by people with disorders such as aphasia and dysarthria, and they consider the contribution that research on disordered speech can provide for the modelling of speech production; and in Chapter 15, Ben Maassen & Hayo Terband describe current knowledge concerning the diagnosis of childhood apraxia of speech, and they argue that it is essential to adopt a process-oriented diagnosis, using special tasks to gain insights into the various tasks involved in speech production, though currently most diagnosis is behaviour-oriented, depending on analysis of the features of speech produced.

Part IV, on sequencing and planning, has five chapters. Chapter 16 is by Peter MacNeilage, and he outlines the frame/content theory of speech evolution, arguing that speech arose out of basic rhythmical patterns of raising and lowering the jaw to create primitive syllables, and consonants and vowels then developed within this syllabic frame, a theory that conflicts with that proposed by Articulatory Phonology. In Chapter 17, Melissa Redford describes the acquisition of temporal patterns by children, from babbling and first words to multi-word utterances. Chapter 18, by Gary Dell & Gary Oppenheim, presents the findings of research on errors that occur in ‘inner speech’, speech that is not actually articulated, in attempts to separate the effects of motor control of the articulators from the mental representation of words. In Chapter 19, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel presents evidence from speech production that shows that there is a prosodic frame for an utterance that precedes, and is independent of, its syntactic structure. Chapter 20, by Robin Lickley, is about fluency and disfluency, including an overview of pauses, other kinds of disfluency, and the types of repairs that typically occur in speech.

The last section in the book, on language factors, has four chapters. In Chapter 21, Didier Demolin describes fieldwork techniques for determining the precise timing, glottal settings, nasalisation, and place of articulation for the consonants and vowels of a range of languages. In Chapter 22, Taehong Cho summarises what is known about cross-language differences in timing at both segmental and suprasegmental levels, including variation in VOT, vowel duration, tonal alignment, and segmental lengthening at the edges of intonational phrases. In Chapter 23, Jan Edwards, Mary Beckman & Benjamin Munson discuss differences in phonological acquisition by children with a range of first languages, especially for data collected in their παιδολογος project involving children speaking languages such as Cantonese, English, Greek, Korean and Japanese. Finally, in Chapter 24, Lisa Goffman describes the interactions between motor control and language, summarising what we know about how the development of sounds, words, stress, and syntax affect the production of words in infants.

In a handbook such as this, there is a tension between producing chapters that are succinct overviews of a field so that they constitute useful introductions for non-experts, or else up-to-date summaries of the current state of knowledge that might be more valuable for specialists in the various fields, and most of the chapters in this volume tend towards the latter. As a result, the book represents an impressive compilation of detailed information about the anatomy of the speech organs, their coordination in the production of speech, the representation of speech in the mind, and the planning that underlies control over language. However, the amount of information that is presented can sometimes be a bit overwhelming, for example when describing all the muscles controlling the movement of the jaws and lips (Chapter 5), listing the range of orofacial mechanoreceptors such as ‘Ruffini corpuscles, Meissner corpuscles, Merkes disk receptors, Pacini corpuscles, hair follicle fibers and free nerve endings’ (Chapter 12, p. 252), and listing different types of dysarthria, including ‘spastic, flaccid, hypokinetic, hyperkinetic, ataxic, and mixed’ (Chapter 14, p. 300). I am not sure how useful these lists are, though it is possible that experts in the various fields will find them helpful. Not only does the text include quite a few lists like these, but some of the presentation can also be rather dense. For example in Chapter 13 (p. 281) we are told that ‘[t]he white matter tracts of the extreme capsule and uncinate fasciculus connect the mid- and anterior-STG/STS with the pars triangularis (PTr) and ventral opercular (vOp) aeas of Broca's region’. I guess this might be exceptionally valuable for people with a detailed knowledge of auditory feedback mechanisms, but I have to admit that I was lost at this point.

In fact, most of the book is concerned with fields such as physiology and mental models, and not much is about phonetics. Furthermore, some of the material on phonetics is flawed. For example: in Chapter 7 describing coordination between the articulators, it is stated that, for data on /m/ in syllable-initial position, ‘the end of the velar lowering movement for /m/ roughly coincided with the beginning of the lip-raising movement for the oral closure’, while for /m/ in syllable-final position, ‘the end of the velar lowering movement roughly corresponded to the beginning of the lip closing movement’ (p. 138) – something must be wrong here, as the coordination of lips and velum is stated to be identical for syllable-initial and syllable-final positions, so there appears to be no difference in coordination; in Figure 10.1, showing the correlation of acoustic and visual information for the various vowels, a close front rounded vowel seems to be represented as ‘v’, but then this vowel is associated with a low level of lip rounding and not much information in the visual channel, so I am not sure if it really represents a front rounded vowel or not (p. 206); in Chapter 12, in connection with recording data to investigate the orofacial cutaneous contribution to speech learning, it is stated that words beginning with /h/ rather than /w/ were used as /h/ ‘involves a different pattern of lip protrusion than the production of /w/’ (p. 259), but surely there is no pattern of lip protrusion for /h/, as its articulation depends entirely on the following vowel; in Chapter 14, reference is made to the vowel /eh/ in ‘bell’ (p. 314); in Figure 18.2, the arrows suggest that /ɹ/ is a voiced alveolar approximant, and I suspect the arrow was intended to link the circle showing ‘Alveolar’ with /l/ not /ɹ/ (p. 409); in Chapter 21, it is stated that ‘[t]he field data indicate that the IPA should be revised to state that an (sic) uvular tap is possible’ (p. 487), which makes no sense as the IPA chart has always allowed for the possibility of a uvular tap, so I suspect that ‘exists’ was intended rather than ‘is possible’; and in Chapter 22, ‘the monkey hid’ is transcribed as [ðɘ mΛηki hId] (p. 512).

Despite the limited material on phonetics in the book and the flawed nature of some that is included, some of the chapters will be of considerable interest to phoneticians. I particularly valued Chapter 8 (on rhythm) and Chapter 21 (on field methods). However, there were lots of places in these two chapters where the material is rather compact and I would have liked more elaboration. For example, on page 159, right at the start of the coverage of rhythm, a metrical tree is shown next to a short musical representation for what is termed the ‘shave-and-a-haircut – two bits’ motif, with the tree deriving the relative strength of the beats. Here I have combined the two, so the numerical output from the metrical tree is shown below the musical notation, with ‘3’ indicating a strong beat and ‘0’ a weak beat:

While I can easily accept that the first note (shown as ‘3’) is the strongest, I find it counter-intuitive that the second strongest beat (‘2’) falls on a crochet rest at the start of the second bar. No doubt this is accurate, for the author of Chapter 8, Fred Cummins, is certainly an expert in the analysis of rhythm; but as a non-expert on music, I would have appreciated some elaboration on silent beats being relatively strong beats. Indeed, this seems rather important in the measurement and description of the rhythm of conversational speech, as most analyses treat pauses as interruptions in fluency and not the location of rhythmic beats. Do silent beats mostly occur only in music and maybe also in poetry? If they also occur in conversational speech, how frequent are they? And how can one differentiate a silent beat from a pause? Some further coverage of these issues would have been welcome.

Chapter 21 consists of an overview of field methods used in the detailed analysis of the articulation of exotic sounds in a range of languages, including implosives in Fulfulde, clicks in Shona and Rwanda, ejective fricatives in Amharic, glottalic vowels in Nasa Yuwe, whistled laterals in Sardinian, uvular taps in Kalapalo, and nasalised fricatives in Guarani. The only figure in the chapter (p. 491) shows the alignment of oral and nasal airflow with the audio wave in the analysis of nasalised fricatives in Guarani, and this figure is exceptionally helpful; but I would really have appreciated similar figures illustrating the alignment of acoustic, aerodynamic and EGG information for the data in Fulfulde, Shona, Rwanda, Amharic, Nasa Yuwe, Sardinian and Kalapalo. Without such elaboration, the data is somewhat dry, and I would have learned much more if fewer language phenomena had been covered but there had been greater elaboration (with appropriate figures) for each one. In the absence of such figures to illustrate the data more fully, the material tends to degenerate into a list of items, not so different from the lists of muscles in Chapter 5, mechanoreceptors in Chapter 12 and types of dysarthria in Chapter 14.

In summary, the chapters in this book present an impressive, if somewhat densely packed, collation of material on speech production in normal adult speech as well as in disordered and developmental speech. All the chapters are written with great authority, but in many cases they will appeal more to experts in the fields than to non-experts looking for a succinct overview of the field. The book will certainly be valued by many looking for an up-to-date survey of research into the various fields, though in many cases readers will have to follow up the references to gain a full understanding about some of the issues that are discussed.