Actions are organized around goals or intentions. In speech production, there has been no agreement on how best to discuss speech goals. However, the auditory feedback perturbation methodology provides a window into the nature of speech goals. To the extent that subjects are sensitive to variation in an acoustic attribute, this attribute must be part of the controlled intention of articulation. In this presentation, we will review a series of studies that speak to this issue. In one study, we examined how intentionality of speech production influences compensatory formant production by instructing subjects to use a cognitive strategy in order to make the feedback sound consistent with the intended vowel. In other studies, we have explored the specificity of vowel formant compensation by comparing cross-language differences. The results indicate that speech goals are (1) very specific, defined by a phonemic category and its relationship with neighboring categories, and (2) multivariate. We will discuss these results by contrasting compensatory behaviors in reaching and limb movements to those observed in speech studies. The presence of a system of categories in speech may result in differences in the way speech goals are represented.