Investigations of the configurations and motions of the speech‐generating mechanism during an utterance provide data that can be related in a reasonably direct fashion both to the acoustic signal that results from these motions and to the linguistic description that underlies the utterance. Results of several studies of cineradiographic films of speech and of airflow and pressure events in speech show that simple articulatory correlates of the features associated with a given phoneme maintain an identity when the phoneme is embedded in various environments, whereas the acoustic correlates of these features are apparently more complx and are more dependent upon the phonetic environment. Studies of the relations between articulatory activity and the resulting speech sounds can be used to provide insight into the invariant set of acoustic attributes or cues that characterize a given phoneme.