“Phonetic bases of distinctive features”: Introduction

The papers collected in this issue emanate, for the most part, from a conference on the theme "Phonetic Bases of Distinctive Features" held at the Carre des Sciences, Ministere Delegue de la Recherche, Paris, on July 3, 2006. This conference gathered a number of specialists from several disciplines within linguistics and the speech sciences to exchange views on the phonetic bases of distinctive features from a variety of perspectives. The larger goal was to address current issues in feature theory and to take a step toward synthesizing recent advances in order to present a current "state of the art" of the field. These brief introductory remarks will attempt to lay out the theme as it was addressed by the conference participants. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]