This textbook has been carefully designed to provide a thorough introduction to the study of speech. It assumes no technical background, and students from the wide variety of disciplines contributing to this new and exciting field will find the exposition always accessible. Each chapter progresses from simple examples to more detailed discussions of recent primary research and concludes with problem sets which student's will find interesting and enlightening. All the topics that are essential for a basic understanding of the field are covered - the physiological, biological, and neurological bases of speech; the physics of sound; the source-filter theory of speech production; and the principles underlying electrical and computer models of speech production. All students, whatever their area of special interest speech therapy, phonological theory, psycholinguistics. neurolinguistics, anthropology, etc. - will discover in this text the challenge and fascination of the scientific study of speech. The authors undoubtedly succeed in their explicit aim: not only, to prepare students to evaluate critically the latest research, but also to encourage them to undertake their own research projects.