The Second Conference on Laboratory Phonology was organized by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and took place in Edinburgh from 30 June to 3 July 1989. The conference's primary aim was to further the general intellectual agenda set by the ambitiously named First Conference, which brought together researchers in phonological theory and experimental phonetics to discuss the increasing convergence of their interests. An important secondary aim was to bring together researchers from both sides of the Atlantic: whereas the first conference was almost exclusively American, the second had significant delegations from several European countries and Japan as well as the USA. This book is the record of the second conference.

We say “record” rather than “proceedings” because the papers collected here are neither all nor only those presented in Edinburgh. As in the first conference, the main papers were circulated in advance and invited discussants gave prepared comments at the conference; this format is reflected in the organization of this volume as a series of chapters with commentaries. However, all of the main papers were formally refereed after the conference, and have been revised, in the light of both referees' comments and discussion at the conference itself, for publication in their present form. Moreover, for a variety of reasons, quite a number of contributions to the conference (listed at the end of this introduction) do not appear in the volume, and as a result, the volume's organization is rather different from that of the conference program.