This chapter first notes progress in finding ‘new’ sounds in languages and advances in (computer-related) instrumentation, which underpinned discoveries in phonetics and experimental phonology, 1950-2000, in three areas.

1. 1. speech production, e.g., control of air-streams, phonation, articulation, hidden articulation (underarticulation), ‘covert contrast’, and co-articulation.

2. 2. advances in speech acoustics, e.g., models of the relationship between articulation and the resulting sound (FFT, LPC, ‘Distinctive Regions and Modes Theory’).

3. 3. new findings in speech perception:

   1. a) context-sensitivity of perceptual cues;

   2. b) categorical perception;

   3. c) variability and the search for invariance, including the ‘quantal nature of speech’; the (connectionist) ‘Fuzzy Logical Model of Phoneme Identification’; models of speech recognition from acoustic data: LAFS (‘Lexical Access From Spectra’) and ‘TRACE’; exemplar-based approaches to phonology; the probabilistic turn in Laboratory Phonology; evidence of the importance of frequency effects and the lexical status of stimuli in perception; holistic models of speech perception, including the integration of multiple cues, which combine expectations with bottom-up acoustic processing; ‘the phoneme restoration effect’ with deleted phonemes; statistical, pattern-matching approach to speech perception; evidence that phonological representations may be rich in phonetic detail and memorized from experience.

Work of this sort might unite experimental/theoretical phonetics/phonology, in the 21st c.