Tending the Garden or the Plant?

The target paper of this commentary—“The Equilibrium Point Hypothesis and Its Application to Speech Motor Control”—by Perrier, Ostry, and Laboissière (hereafter POL) presents a sophisticated application of the λ-version of the Equilibrium Point Hypothesis to issues of linguistic concern in the control and coordination of speech articulators. This is done in terms of an elegant model of jaw biomechanics and neuromotor control. Their synthesis of the EP Hypothesis and jaw model will continue to encourage the consideration of biomechanics in the interpretation of articulatory kinematics. Our reflections, outlined below, generally concern the appropriateness of microversus macrolevels of abstraction when considering the manifestation of linguistic intentions in speech motor control. Specifically, we address 1) POL’s conception of planning and invariance; 2) the significance of the linguistic task in understanding speech motor control; and 3) areas of future development for this and other speech production models in the areas of intraand inter-articulator timing.