Reply to Sverre Stausland Johnsen, Janne Bondi Johannessen and Bert Vaux

This is a reply to the comments by Sverre Stausland Johnsen, Janne Bondi Johannessen, and Bert Vaux to our article from 2008 entitled “Norwegian retroflex stops in a cross linguistic perspective” (Simonsen, Moen, & Cowen, 2008). We focus on methods, and discuss advantages and problems in the use of EPG and EMA in investigations of articulation and articulatory variation. We argue that the variations found in our data are not the results of dialect variation, but rather a result of the morphological differences in palate shape between individual speakers.