ABSTRACT
Laboratory phonology (LP) draws on theories and tools from various branches of the sciences to elucidate the linguistic, cognitive, and communicative nature of speech. This chapter introduces LP: its key questions, methodologies, and critical results. The history of LP can be roughly divided into two phases. The first phase encompasses LP's inception and early work revolving around the relationship between phonology and phonetics as understood by the two disciplines at the time. The second phase developed since the mid-90s as the questions were increasingly defined in terms of speech as cognitive science, embedded in a broadly defined communicative system. From its outset, the development of LP was very strongly driven by the work done on the prosodic structure of speech. One of the core questions in Intonational Phonology is the mapping of phonologically relevant tonal targets with segmental strings. Social-indexical variation poses some of the same challenges to phonological theory that language-specific phonetic detail in phoneme contrasts has presented.
