This report, covering the period of July 1 to December 31, 1973, is one of a regular series on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. The materials included in this report are "The Motor Organization of Some Speech Gestures,""Effect of Speaking Rate of Labial Consonant-Vowel Articulation,""Stress and Syllable Duration Change,""Parallel Processing of Auditory and Phonetic Information in Speech Perception,""Perception of Speech and Nonspeech, with Speech-Relevant and Speech-Irrelevant Transitions,""On the Identification of Place and Voicing Features in Synthetic Stop Consonants,""The Lag Effect in Dichotic Speech Perception,""State-of-the-Art Report on Language Processing,""Audible Outputs of Reading Machines for the Blind," and "An Examination of Hemispheric Asymmetry in the Visual Processing of Linguistic Items." (RB)