Chomsky and Halle (1968) and many formal linguists rely on the notion of a universally available phonetic space defined in discrete time. This assumption plays a central role in phonological theory. Discreteness at the phonetic level guarantees the discreteness of all other levels of language. But decades of phonetics research demonstrate that there exists no universal inventory of phonetic objects. We discuss three kinds of evidence: first, phonologies differ incommensurably. Second, some phonetic characteristics of languages depend on intrinsically temporal patterns, and, third, some linguistic sound categories within a language are different from each other despite a high degree of overlap that precludes distinctness. Linguistics has mistakenly presumed that speech can always be spelled with letter-like tokens. A variety of implications of these conclusions for research in phonology are discussed.*

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Studies of English speech timing have concluded that, despite earlier claims, English is neither stress-timed nor syllable-timed. This study directly measured context effects on timing depending on prosodic neighborhood, and compared the contribution of any stress-timing or syllable-timing tendency while speech cycling. Ss repeated a phrase to a metronome at varying rates. This complex metronome included high-pitched tones (‘beeps’) at roughly 1 s with a lower tone (‘boop’) occurring either 1/2 (2-beat) or 2/3 (3-beat) of the way between beeps. We hypothesize dynamical attractors for stressed syllables at simple harmonic fractions (1/2, 1/3, 2/3) of the phrase cycle. Various texts invite readings with two stresses (‘Bite the back’) or three stresses (‘Bite Bill’s back’), and some had perturbing unstressed syllables inserted between stressed ones (‘Biting Bill’s back’). Perturbing and target vowel onset times were fit with a multiple linear regression equation using time predictions assuming equal stress intervals or equal syllable intervals. The estimated slopes indicate the relative weight of stress versus syllable timing. The weights were greater for stress timing for all subjects, supporting a model of global speech timing where stressed syllable locations have attractors at harmonic fractions, as might be found in a bank of coupled oscillators.