Research reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for the investigation of speech, and practical applications of speech research are included in this status report for the April 1-June 30, 1981, period. The 14 reports deal with the following topics: (1) electromyography as a technique for laryngeal investigation, (2) the phonatory mechanism, (3) phonetic perception of sinusoidal signals, (4) memory for item order and phonetic recoding in the beginning reader, (5) perceptual equivalence of two kinds of ambiguous speech stimuli, (6) perceptual targets and production rules, (7) orthographic variations and visual information processing, (8) visual word recognition in Serbo-Croatian, (9) word recognition with mixed-alphabet forms, (10) intralanguage versus interlanguage Stroop effects in two types of writing systems, (11) categorical perception of English "r" and "l" sounds by Japanese bilinguals, (12) the influence of vocalic context on perception of the "s"/"z" distinction and two ways of avoiding it, (13) grammatical priming of inflected nouns, and (14) an evaluation of the "Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure" in a phonologically shallow orthography. (FL)