WSC4 is the continuation of the highly successful workshop series that have previously been held in Barcelona (2010), Kloster Seeon (2012) and Berkeley (2014). The aim of this workshop series is to bring together scholars from a wide range of theoretical and methodological backgrounds in order to foster truly collaborative and interdisciplinary work on the actuation, evaluation, transmission, and diffusion of sound change.

The theme of this workshop is “individuals, communities, and sound change”, with special attention to the role of individual differences in the initiation and propagation of change. By “individual differences”, we refer to those psychological, sociological, genetic and/or behavioural differences between the individuals who make up a speech community at the levels of production, perception and cognitive representation.

The workshop will consist of oral presentations, discussion sessions, and poster sessions. We welcome abstracts on any topic related to the workshop themes or to empirical research on sound change more generally. Abstract submitters may choose to have their abstract considered either for a poster only, or for a poster or a talk. Following past practice for the WSC, we anticipate that most abstracts selected for presentation will be allocated a poster presentation slot. A small number of abstracts which fit with the theme of the workshop will be selected to be presented as talks (in addition to the talks from invited speakers).

Anonymized abstracts (PDF, 12 point font, max 1 page text + 1 page figures and references) may be submitted via EasyAbstracts. You may submit no more than one abstract as first author. To submit an abstract, please use the submission page at http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/wsc4.

WSC4 will be held at the University of Edinburgh from 20-22 April 2017; two satellite workshops will be held on 19 April 2017. For more details, please refer to the WSC4 website:

http://lel.ed.ac.uk/wsc/

For questions or more information, contact the organisers by email at wsc@ed.ac.uk.