Special sessions 

Organisers
Jen Hay – University of Canterbury
jen.hay@canterbury.ac.nz
Katie Drager – University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

Type
Oral Session

Abstract
A variety of recent work suggests that socio-contextual factors can automatically affect patterns of speech production and/or perception. Such factors may include the social context of the physical space, the speaker, the listener, or the relationship between these. Methodologically, understanding these issues is crucial, because without this understanding, our experiments may not be fully controlled. Theoretically, a proper understanding of the relationship between socio-contextual factors and phonetic variation is central to models of lexical representation, phonetic detail, speech production and speech perception. We invite talks (15 mins) presenting experimental evidence which directly address this theme.

Organisers
Oliver Niebuhr – University of Southern Denmark
olni@sdu.dk
Nigel Ward – University of Texas at El Paso

Type
Oral Session 

Abstract
Languages have multistream patterns of prosodic features — such as pitch range, pitch-movement timing, segmental lengthening, voicing properties, loudnesss, and harmonicity — that occur in specific temporal configurations and directly convey pragmatic or interactional meanings. Many features of such configurations have been analyzed, but we still lack a good understanding of their exact nature, including phenomena of parameter timing and coupling, trade-offs, and differences among speakers and across languages. This special session is a venue for researchers from any perspective to discuss how to discover, characterize and model such prosodic constructions from perspectives of speech production, acoustics, or perception.

Organisers
Nicole Rosen – University of Manitoba
Nicole.Rosen@umanitoba.ca
Jesse Stewart – University of Saskatchewan

Type
Poster Session

Abstract
This session targets work on the phonetic repercussions of amalgamating two or more sound systems into a single language. From a phonetic stand point, contact language phonology is a complex arrangement of source language phonologies which do not always conform to traditional notions of adaptive dispersion models. Instead we observe near-mergers, overlapping categories, categorical assimilation or maintenance, and overshoot of target categories at the segmental level, in addition to prosodic assimilation, possible preservations of archaic patterns, and innovation at the suprasegmental level. This session aims to investigate sound systems and phonetic processes resulting from situations of intense language contact.

Organisers
Marzena Żygis – Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) & Humboldt University, Berlin
zygis@leibniz-zas.de
Zofia Malisz – KTH – Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

Type
Oral Session

Abstract
This session aims to bring researchers’ attention to a variety of speech modes used in everyday life. Ranging from voiced speech to different types of semi-whispered speech to fully whispered speech, these modes are used by both healthy and clinical populations. We wish to examine the speech modes from a multimodal perspective and increase the impact of (semi-)whispered speech studies on the development of technical systems such as audio-visual speech synthesis and recognition, as well as on medicine and telecommunications. We invite papers investigating the acoustic, articulatory, gestural and respiratory aspects of these speech modes.

Organisers
Alan C.L. Yu – University of Chicago
aclyu@uchicago.edu
Georgia Zellou – University of California, Davis

Type
Oral Session

Abstract 
This session will focus on various theoretical and methodological issues concerning the perception-production link for co-articulation, a topic that has remained empirically and theoretically controversial in the literature. The aim is to bring together researchers working in different areas using different methodologies to address a recalcitrant topic that has ramifications for theories of speech representation, processing, and models of sound change. We also aim to increase awareness of the need to develop mathematically explicit models of speech perception and production that can provide a platform to model the link between the two modalities.

Organisers 
Elinor Payne – University of Oxford
elinor.payne@phon.ox.ac.uk
Olga Maxwell – University of Melbourne

Type 
Oral Session 

Abstract 
This session will bring together researchers working on any aspect of prosody in New Englishes (varieties of English that have emerged in former British or US colonies e.g., Nigerian English, Indian English, Singaporean English, Phillipine English). We welcome both papers that report specific research findings and those that consider cross-cutting theoretical issues pertaining to the study of English prosody in diverse multilingual contexts.
Submissions are invited on all topics related to prosody in New Englishes (inter alia):
• Pitch-related, spectral and temporal phenomena
• Methodological challenges and advances
• Theoretical issues concerning typology and contact prosody
• Single variety studies
• Cross-variety comparison
• New Englishes in the diaspora

Organisers
Margaret E. L. Renwick – University of Georgia
mrenwick@uga.edu
Ewa Jacewicz – The Ohio State University

Type 
Oral Session 

Abstract 
Recent progress in modeling the dynamic specification of vowels, the time-varying inherent spectral information in monophthongs and diphthongs, has improved analytic approaches and spurred new discoveries in sociophonetics, sound change, first and second language acquisition, and forensic phonetics. This session invites papers presenting state-of-the-art techniques for measurement and statistical analysis that characterize, compare, and visualize the dynamics of formant trajectories, and apply these methods to large, rich datasets from all varieties of English, whose most salient distinctions often result from vowel dynamics. These papers enrich our understanding of vowel quality, and facilitate comparison and discussion of best methodological practices.

Organisers 
Sonya Bird – University of Victoria (Victoria BC – Canada)
sbird@uvic.ca
Rosey Billington – Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language/University of Melbourne (Melbourne VIC, Australia)

Type 
Oral Session 

Abstract 
This special session will focus on what we – phoneticians – can do to help advocate for and support sound-based research as a component of language revitalization and maintenance. Topics of interest include designing and implementing collaborative projects for mutually rewarding outcomes, making documentation work accessible and useful to community members, and building capacity among community members, so that they can undertake their own pronunciation research and teaching. This session aims to further our understanding of the meaningful contributions phoneticians can make, and receive, when working in close partnership with minority and endangered language communities on matters relating to pronunciation.

Organisers 
Melissa Baese-Berk – University of Oregon 
mbaesebe@uoregon.edu
Melinda Fricke – University of Pittsburgh 
Marta Ortega-Llebaria – University of Pittsburgh
Amos Teo – University of Oregon
Seth Wiener – Carnegie Mellon University

Type 
Double Oral Session 

Abstract 
Models of speech perception are based primarily on knowledge of how major (largely Western, Indo-European) language varieties are processed. At the same time, interest in collecting and analyzing empirical data from underrepresented languages has increased, and yet there have been few perception experiments in the field. We propose a session to develop collaborations among two sets of researchers: those who do speech perception work in the laboratory and those who do language documentation in the field. We hope to encourage discussion of theoretical, methodological, and ethical issues that will benefit both communities.

Organisers
Matthew Faytak – University of California, Berkeley
mf@berkeley.edu
Eleanor Chodroff – Northwestern University 

Type
Oral Session

Abstract
Phonetic principles such as dispersion, focalization, and articulatory ease have been argued to constrain phonetic variation and speech sound organization. In this session, we highlight an additional principle of uniformity, in which speakers implement a phonological primitive with maximum similarity across series of speech sounds sharing that primitive. Variants of uniformity have been implicated in identical, parallel, or correlated behavior of phonetic output. This session aims to explore the utility of uniformity for analyzing phonetic structure, its potential for explaining phonetic patterns, and its implications for diverse areas such as language/speaker variation, sound change, speech articulation, and substance-based phonology.

Organisers
Magdalena Wrembel – Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan Poland
magdala@wa.amu.edu.pl
Romana Kopeckova – University of Munster, Munster Germany 

Type
Oral Session

Abstract
Extant findings into the acquisition of third language (L3) phonology report complex patterns of interaction between native and non-native languages. A full account of multiple speech learning and the factors conditioning cross-linguistic influence is still lacking, however. The aim of this special session is thus to address the theoretical and methodological challenges in the study of L3 speech perception and production. Different L3 learners (heritage, bilingual, foreign language learners), methodologies (cross-sectional and longitudinal), and language combinations (Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages) will be pooled in individual papers to shed further light on this under-researched yet prevalent area of phonological acquisition.

Organisers
Reiko Mazuka – RIKEN Center for Brain Science 
mazuka@brain.riken.jp
Mary Beckman – Ohio State University

Type
Poster Session

Abstract
Infants and children must learn to perceive and produce the acoustic cues that differentiate phonemes. Yet these cues may vary across prosodic contexts, across speech registers, across social groups defined by region, gender, age, etc. We invite papers describing methods or data gathered in the laboratory or the field that can illuminate how such variation affects young language learners, focusing on cues for laryngeal contrasts in stops. We particularly welcome papers on languages with known variation across generations of speakers, including young contact languages, such as Gurindji Kriol, and languages with sound changes in progress, such as Korean and Japanese

Organisers
Michael Proctor – Macquarie University
michael.proctor@mq.edu.au
Martijn Weiling –University of Groningen
Mark Tiede – Haskins Laboratories
Lucie Ménard – Université du Québec à Montréal
Christina Hagedorn – College of Staten Island
Eric S. Jackson – New York University

Type
Workshop Session 

Abstract
The aim of this workshop is to review and disseminate current research on methods for measuring, characterizing, and interpreting the phonetic (acoustic and articulatory) properties of atypical and disordered speech. This is important to phoneticians describing more diverse speaker populations, and to clinicians assessing disordered speech. Research in these domains is currently limited by a lack of understanding about the most appropriate ways to characterize these types of speech: which parameters should be measured, and in which ways, to provide insights into atypical speech properties, beyond standard considerations for quantifying and modelling phonetic variability as in any other diverse speaker population.

Organisers
Lisa Davidson – New York University
lisa.davidson@nyu.edu
Marc Garellek – University of California, San Diego

Type
Workshop Session

Abstract
Voice quality plays a role in phonological contrasts of phonation type and tone, prosodic marking, and sociolinguistic indexation. This session will address unanswered questions about the acoustic measurements that have been used to measure voice quality, including: What is the relationship between acoustic measures of voice quality, voice articulation, and perception? How consistent are these measures at capturing categories both across speakers of the same language, and at grouping similar categories across different languages? How do individuals differ in their implementation of voice quality? When judging changes in voice quality, do different listeners rely on the same measures?

Organisers
Jane Stuart-Smith – University of Glasgow 
Jane.Stuart-Smith@glasgow.ac.uk
Morgan Sonderegger – McGill University 
Yvan Rose – Memorial University of Newfoundland

Type
Workshop Session

Abstract
Phonetic research has tended to carry out fine-grained analysis of a few aspects of speech from relatively few languages or dialects. But speech research is now entering its own ‘big data’ revolution, with huge digital collections of transcribed speech, from many different languages. The focus of this special session is to introduce and discuss the opportunities and challenges of large-scale, automated speech analysis for phonetic sciences, by considering freely available software systems which integrate speech database management with automated analyses. The special session will provide a forum for phoneticians to discuss large-scale speech analysis with those working to develop such software.

Organisers
Laurent Besacier – LIG UGA (France)
laurent.besacier@imag.fr
Alexis Michaud – LACITO CNRS (France)
Martine Adda-Decker – LPP CNRS (France)
Gilles Adda – LIMSI CNRS (France)
Steven Bird – CDU (Australia)
Graham Neubig – CMU (USA)
François Pellegrino – DDL CNRS (France)
Sakriani Sakti – NAIST (Japan)
Mark Van de Velde – LLACAN CNRS (France)

Type
Workshop Session 

Abstract
This special session is dedicated to computational approaches for documenting and analyzing oral languages (spoken vernacular languages which depend on oral transmission, including endangered languages and regional varieties of major languages). This special session builds on recent works and projects on innovative speech data collection methods as well as on assistance for linguists and local speakers to accelerate collection, transcription and translation of primary language data. The special session will update phoneticians on developments in machine learning which automatically segment, align or label speech collections and will help establish the field of computational language documentation and contribute to its close association with the phonetic sciences.