One of a regular series on the status and progress of research into the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications, this report consists of 17 papers dealing with the following topics: (1) vagueness and fictions as cornerstones of a theory of perceiving and acting--a commentary on D.O. Walter; (2) the informational support for upright stance; (3) determining the extent of coarticulation--effects of experimental design; (4) the roles of phoneme frequency, similarity, and availability in the experimental elicitation of speech errors; (5) on learning to speak; (6) the motor theory of speech perception revised; (7) linguistic and acoustic correlates of the perceptual structure found in an individual differences scaling study of vowels; (8) perceptual coherence of speech--stability of silence-cued stop consonants; (9) development of the speech perceptumotor system; (10) dependence of reading on orthography--investigations in Serbo-Croatian; (11) the relationship between knowledge of derivational morphology and spelling ability in fourth, sixth, and eighth graders; (12) relations among regular and irregular, morphologically related words in the lexicon as revealed by repetition priming; (13) grammatical priming of inflected nouns by the gender of possessive adjectives; (14) grammatical priming of inflected nouns by inflected adjectives; (15) deaf signers and serial recall in the visual modality--memory for signs, fingerspelling, and print; (16) did orthographies evolve? and (17) the development of children's sensitivity to factors influencing vowel reading. (HOD)