Welcome

In this editorial, we would like to briefly describe our goals and vision for Phonetica, discuss its Aims and Scopes, and introduce some new opportunities we are working on. However, before we do any of these things, we would like to acknowledge and express our gratitude to those who have come before us.

Phonetica was founded in 1957 by Eberhard Zwirner, and in the last 68 years has been cared for by a strong group of editors; we are honored to join them. We would like to acknowledge Klaus Kohler for the work he put into the journal as its Editor for 35 years (1979-2013) working with his North American co-editors John Ohala (1986-1989) and Randy Diehl (1990-2000). As editor, Dr. Kohler championed the idea of Communicative Phonetic Sciences which addresses the fundamental question: “How do humans communicate by speech in the world’s languages?” (Kohler 2014).

We especially thank Catherine Best, who has been the Editor of Phonetica for the last 11 years (Best 2014). She oversaw a transition of the journal from its previous publishing home at Karger to what is now De Gruyter Brill. She worked to increase the status of the journal by diversifying both the readership and the submissions (both geographically and subtopically), as well as the diversifying scientific editorial team. As part of her editorial work, Dr. Best broadened the scope and accessibility of the journal and shepherded it through the pandemic. In particular, we appreciate her enthusiasm and support in our efforts to become Phonetica’s editors and we are grateful for her mentorship as we learn about the editorial work for the journal.

We are excited about our new roles as co-editors of Phonetica. Our editorship will be based on our goals and vision for the journal, which we elaborate on in this editorial. We will seek to maintain the journal’s stature and rigor while continuing its upward trend in broad relevance to the field. In doing so, we will seek to keep the journal current with the state of the art in the phonetic sciences. Specifically, our goals are to increase the number of review articles, introduce methodological articles, increase the number of high-quality submissions, and decrease the time to first decision and time to publication. We will strive to find innovative ways to move the journal forward and anticipate changes in the field of publishing. In particular, we will work with De Gruyter Brill to achieve a sustainable and equitable open-access format.

We will continue to expand and diversify article topics to encompass more research areas of phonetics as we strive to understand human communication. This vision will guide us to continue to broaden readership by increasing the relevance of Phonetica to phoneticians of all stripes. We are delighted to work with the excellent team of Associate Editors and the Editorial Board members. We will strive to maintain the geographic, linguistic, and subdisciplinary diversity as new Associate Editors and board members join the team.

As part of our co-editorship, we plan to introduce a new category of publication to Phonetica. We are going to call these ‘Methodology Articles’. The purpose of these articles is to give phoneticians a venue to publish work that is of methodological interest. It is hoped that this article type will provide researchers with the opportunity to publish short (3000-4000 words) descriptions of methodological approaches in the phonetic sciences. These articles might include topics covering the validation of acoustic measures, methods or techniques for investigating speech articulation, experimental designs and implementations, computational tools, and statistical methods.

As part of the process of taking over the editorship of Phonetica we have reviewed and made some small updates to the aims and scope of the journal. We introduce the updated aims and scope which can be read below and are now updated on the journal webpage: https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/phon/html?lang=en.

Phonetica is an international forum for phonetic science that addresses all aspects of the subject matter including phonetic descriptions, articulatory and signal analytic measures of production, perception, acquisition, and phonetic variati on and change. Contemporary interdisciplinary research on phonetics employs a wide range of methodological approaches to investigate the properties and principles of phonetics in communicative settings across the world’s languages, from instrumental and acoustic measures to perceptual and neurocognitive procedures to computational modeling. It also ranges across styles, types of language users, and communicative modalities (speech, sign, song). Phonetica thus provides a platform for a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of phonetic science across languages and dialects, across the lifespan, and across contexts. Papers published in this journal cover theoretical issues, new empirical data, innovative methods, critical theoretical/empirical reviews, and applications that help to advance the field.

Phonetica now includes the following types of articles that may be published: Research Article, Review Article, Discussion, Methodology, Book Notice, and Book Discussion. In conclusion, we invite authors engaged in all areas of the phonetic sciences to submit articles to Phonetica. We are enthusiastic about the future of the journal and look forward to learning more about speech communication.