Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction to Variation and Gradience in Phonetics and Phonology -- Accepting unlawful variation and unnatural classes -- Phonetic variation and gestural specification: Production of Russian consonants -- Variation in the perception of an L2 contrast: A combined phonetic and phonological account -- Prosodic conditioning, vowel dynamics and sound change -- Variable quality of the Czech lateral liquid: A perception experiment with young Czech listeners -- Patterns of lenition in Brazilian Portuguese -- Silent onsets? An optimality-theoretic approach to French h aspiré words -- Gradient dorsal nasal in Northern German -- Lexical exceptionality in Florentine Italian troncamento -- On the distribution of dorsals in complex and simple onsets in child German, Dutch and English -- Phonological knowledge in compensation for native and non-native assimilation -- The erosion of a variable process. The case of n-deletion in Ripuarian and Limburg dialects of Dutch -- Minimal morpheme expression in Dutch dialectology -- Regional variation in intonation: Conversational instances of the "hat pattern" in Cologne German -- A model for the quantification of pitch accent realisation -- Backmatter