This volume marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of William Book's 1908 The Psychology of Skill, in which typewriting received its first large-scale treatment from a psychological standpoint. As Book realized early on, this form of human behavior is particularly well suited to testing psychological theories of complex motor skill and its acquisition, present ing as it does a task that richly engages cognitive and motor components of programming, yet involves a form of response output that can be readily quantified. Now that typewriting is practiced so widely in workday circumstances,...

The scientific study of speech production has been undertaken within a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, physiology, physical acoustics, and psychology, among others. In recent years, it has become possible to combine the knowledge accumulated within these separate disciplines to gain more insight into the nature of this complex human activity. Here, we apply an interdisciplinary focus to one of the most widely discussed and poorly under stood aspects of the speech signal. This study of fundamental voice frequency involves a mixture of linguistics, physical acoustics, and...