Frontmatter -- Table of contents -- Introduction -- Dedication -- I. Qualitative and variable faces of phonological competence -- "Distinctive phones" in surface representation -- The functionality of incomplete neutralization in Dutch: The case of the past-tense formation -- Dynamics in grammar: Comment on Ladd and Ernestus & Baayen -- The statistical basis of an unnatural alternation -- Modeling intonation in English: A probabilistic approach to phonological competence -- The diachrony of labiality in Trique, and the functional relevance of gradience and variation -- Effects of language modality on word segmentation: An experimental study of phonological factors in a sign language -- Phonological, phonetics and the nondominant hand -- Lexical retrieval in American Sign Language production -- Phonological priming in British Sign Language -- Phonetic implementation and phonetic pre-specification in sign language phonology -- Variability in verbal agreement forms across four signed languages -- Some current claims about sign language phonetics, phonology, and experimental results -- II. Sources of variation and their role in the acquisition of phonological competence -- Getting the rhytm right: A cross-linguistic study of segmental duration in babbling and first words -- Flexibility in the face incompatible English VOT systems -- On the scope of phonological learning: Issues arising from socially-structured variation -- Variation in developing phonologies: Comments on Vihman and colleagues, Docherty and colleagues, and Scobbie -- III. Knowledge of language-specific organization of speech gestures -- Prosody first or prosody last? Evidence from the phonetics of word-final /t/ in American English -- Focusing, prosodic phrasing, and hiatus resolution in Greek -- Early vs. late focus: Pitch-peak alignment in two dialects of Serbian and Croatian -- Manifestation of prosodic structure in articulatory variation: Evidence from lip kinematics in English -- Relating prosody and dynamic events: Comments on the papers by Cho and Smiljanić -- Syllable position effects and gestural organization: Articulatory evidence from Russia -- Perceptual salience and palatalization in Russian -- Integrating coarticulation, assimilation, and blending into a model of articulatory constraints -- Excrescent schwa and vowel laxing: Cross-linguistic: responses to conflicting articulatory targets -- Backmatter