Reviewed by Carolina González, Florida State University

This volume presents a selection of papers from the second meeting of the Phonetics and Phonology in Iberia conference, which took place in June 2005 at the Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona. Most of the contributions explore the relationship between phonetics and phonology in one or more Romance languages or dialects. The emphasis is both descriptive and theoretical, and although many theoretical approaches are represented, most contributions follow a laboratory phonology approach.

This book is divided into three sections. In Part 1, ‘Segments and processes’, Noël Nguyen, Sophie Wauquier, Leonardo Lancia, and Betty Tuller explore the mechanisms involved in the perception of liaison consonants in French. Daniel Recasens focuses on coarticulation in Catalan and Spanish vowel-consonant-vowel sequences. Maria-Josep Solé discusses the effect of feature stability on coarticulation in fricative-nasal clusters. Francisco Torreira provides instrumental evidence that /s/ aspiration in Andalusian Spanish results in postaspiration of an immediately following voiceless stop.

In Part 2, ‘Prosodic structure’, Lluïsa Astruc-Aguilera and Francis Nolan examine phrasing and accentuation in various types of extrasentential elements in English and Catalan. Laura Colantoni and Jeffrey Steele explore asymmetries in assimilation and dissimilation in stop-liquid clusters in Argentinean and Chilean Spanish as well as in European and Quebec French. Sónia Frota, Mariapaola D’Imperio, Gorka Elordieta, Pilar Prieto, and Marina Vigário examine the phonetic and phonological characteristics of intonational boundaries in five Romance languages. Marta Ortega-Llebaria and Pilar Prieto investigate the correlates of stress independent of accent in Barcelona Spanish.

In Part 3, ‘Acquisition of segmental contrasts and prosody’, M. João Freitas explores the acquisition of vowel reduction in European Portuguese. Ferran Pons and Laura Bosch consider a number of experiments on infant perception of iambic and trochaic rhythm in Catalan and Spanish. Geoffrey-Stewart Morrison contributes a tutorial on the application of logistic regression in speech perception research on first and second language learners. In the final paper, Laurence White and Sven L. Mattys focus on the best acoustic correlates to account for isochrony-based rhythmic classes (i.e. stress-time vs. syllable-time).

This collection provides a good overview of current research in Romance phonetics and phonology. The papers explore differences and similarities among Romance languages and dialects, and in many occasions, between Romance and other language families (most notably Germanic). Phonologists and phoneticians, specifically those interested in Romance languages, will benefit from this work.