As one of a regular series, this report focuses on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. Drawn from the period of July 1 to December 31, 1981, the 15 manuscripts cover the following topics: (1) phonetic trading relations and context effects; (2) temporal patterns of coarticulation; (3) temporal constraints on anticipatory coarticulation; (4) the phonetics of stop-consonant sequences; (5) impaired speech production of hearing-impaired speakers; (6) specialized processes of phonetic perception; (7) reading, prosody, and orthography; (8) children's memory for recurring linguistic and nonlinguistic material in relation to reading ability; (9) phonetic and auditory trading relations between acoustic cues in speech perception; (10) production-perception of phonetic contrast during phonetic change; (11) decay of auditory memory in vowel discrimination; (12) phonetic structure and meaning; (13) ecological acoustics; (14) linguistic conventions and speech-sign relationships; and (15) fricative-stop coarticulation. (RL)