This volume celebrates Max Wajskop's vision of the multi-faceted nature of speech communication. The papers, individually and collectively a manifestation of the interdisciplinary study approach advocated by Max Wajskop, consider his inspiring attempts to integrate traditional and modern tools of analysis. They further his belief that a cross-fertilization of ideas from the largely isolationist domains of linguistics, psychology, communication engineering and language teaching, afford a discovery of many common principles in the overall pursuit of an understanding of the basic structure and behaviour of speech. synthesis as well as automatic speech recognition and phonetic and phonological modelling. The methodological approaches applied - mathematical, psychological, statistical and philological - cover every aspect of the speech chain: the glottis, vocal tract, speech wave (time and frequency), ear and brain. Furthermore, all the primary levels of language are represented: syntax, lexicon, phonology and phonetics.