Synthesizing decades of collective experience into a set of practical guidelines for students and budding researchers, the authors of this book introduce a systematic approach to generating, processing, and interpreting reliable and valid speech data. They review a variety of observational and experimental tasks that allow researchers to collect natural speech, elicit specific types of speech, and assess language comprehension.

Guidelines for generating data sets by transcribing and coding raw speech data are also reviewed, as are special considerations for working with infants and multilingual children.