Speech Units Workshop

This workshop invites contributions for 30-minute presentations (20+10) dealing with the speech production and structure of word, word-like, and intonational units in child and adult speech from diverse languages and language varieties. Contributions discussing aspects in relation to bi- or multilingual speakers are also encouraged, as are studies dealing with experimental data collection and corpus-based investigations. 

New submission deadline: 1st December 2022

Submission deadline: 15th November 2022

Date of notification: 23rd December 2022 

Potential research questions include (but are not limited to): 

• How are speech units marked phonetically and phonologically in diverse languages? 

• What prominence patterns are found cross-linguistically? (e.g., head or edge marking) 

• How do children acquiring typologically diverse languages identify speech units of different sizes from their input? Do they use different cues from those identified in English?  

• Do children initially segment larger units (clauses before words) in all languages? 

• Does the whole-word phonology approach hold across typologically diverse languages? 

• How do children learn to segment and produce syllables in foot and syllable-timed languages? 

• Are there phonetic properties of CDS that enhance the segmentability of speech units by infants?

In addition to presentations scheduled on the first two days, the workshop invites to a third full-day hands-on workshop specifically aimed at (junior) researchers and fieldworkers interested in acquiring methods and best practice in phonetic data collection. This workshop is tailored to provide knowledge for researchers working in field conditions and will provide support for the development of elicitation materials, and data management.

It is not mandatory to present a paper if a participant wishes to be part of the hands-on session.