First published in 1986

The important implications of speech variability for the future of speech related technology, in combination with the multifaceted debate about invariance among speech scientists, make this a most appropriate time to evaluate the state our knowledge in this area.

On October 8-10, 1983, researchers from the fields of production, perception, acoustics, pathology, psychology, linguistics, language acquisition, synthesis and recognition met at a symposium at M.I.T. on invariance and variability of speech processes.

This volume is the Proceedings of the symposium. Each chapter of the book consists of a focus paper followed by some comments.