Meeting Description

Describing the sounds of language has always been a central concern of both linguistic phonetics and theoretical phonology. The central tension between informational abstraction and phonetic concreteness is resolved in ways that differ based partly on one’s theoretical aims. In some cases phonologists use continuously valued representations to derive categorical effects, while in other cases phonologists use categorical representations to derive gradient effects. Phoneticians, psycholinguists and neuroscientists are also concerned with whether representations that are useful in describing the information structure of language sound systems are also useful in capturing facts about the cognitive implementation of phonology.

Workshop participants will represent several different attitudes toward these questions, and one of the goals of the workshop is to discuss whether these different aims are fundamentally incompatible, or whether we can we find a system of description that is successful in both accounting for information structure and for the cognition of language use.

Confirmed speakers include Bruce Hayes (UCLA), Stephanie Shih (USC), Kevin Ryan (Harvard), and Katie Drager (Hawaii).

A full call for papers will be published in Sept. 2019.