Kingston's paper addresses a fundamental problem for the linguistic analysis of speech, namely the coordination among the basic articulatory events, or gestures, in the various speech subsystems. As discussed in Kingston and elsewhere (e.g. Browman and Goldstein 1986), principles of coordination are required once the constraint of simultaneity (implicit in the traditional view of the phonological segment) is abandoned, as it has been both on purely phonological grounds (e.g., Goldsmith 1976; Clements and Keyser 1983) and by virtue of the actual observed articulations (e.g. Bell-Berti and Harris 1981; Lofqvist 1980; Fujimura 1981). Kingston's contribution is to explore a principle that governs certain aspects of laryngeal-oral coordination. The attractiveness of the proposal is that it is wellmotivated in terms of the actual physics of speech – it is not an arbitrary stipulation. On the other hand, certain data suggest that the proposal, as stated, is not correct. The failure of this reasonable-looking principle may lead us in somewhat different directions in the search for principles of gestural organization.

The simple version of Kingston's binding principle (section 23.2) predicts that the timing of glottal articulations with respect to oral constrictions will be more tightly constrained (“bound”) the greater the degree of the oral constriction. The rationale here is that for stops, the glottal opening associated with voicelessness will have a “distal” effect on the characteristics of the stop release burst, as well as a “proximal” effect on the source characteristics. The characteristics of the stop release burst will be influenced by the intraoral pressure behind the stop closure.