The journal's primary objectives are: to present a forum for the advancement of human and human-machine speech communication science; to stimulate cross-fertilization between different fields of this domain; to contribute towards the rapid and wide diffusion of scientifically sound contributions in this domain. Subject coverage. Subject areas covered in this journal include: Basics of oral communication and dialogue: modelling of production and perception processes; phonetics and phonology; syntax; semantics and pragmatics of speech communication; cognitive aspects. Models and tools for language learning: functional organisation and developmental models of human language capabilities; acquisition and rehabilitation of spoken language; speech & hearing defects and aids. Speech signal processing: analysis, coding, transmission, enhancement, robustness to noise. Models for automatic speech communication: speech recognition; language identification; speaker recognition; speech synthesis; oral dialogue. Development and evaluation tools: monolingual and multilingual databases; assessment methodologies; specialised hardware and software packages; field experiments; market development. Multimodal human computer interface: using speech I/O in combination with other modalities, e.g., gesture and handwriting.