The draft program for this year’s Manchester Phonology Meeting (26th-28th May) is now available: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/mfm/24mfm-draftprog.pdf, as is the program for the fringe meeting on Computation and Learning in Phonology (25th May): https://sites.google.com/site/24mfmfringe/.

Call for papers

LabPhon 15 Satellite Workshop: “Higher order structure in speech variability”

Abstract deadline: 30 April 2016

Notification: 15 May 2016

Workshop: 17 July 2016, 9am – 12pm

We’re pleased to announce a satellite workshop following LabPhon15 at Cornell University in Ithaca NY on the topic of “Higher order structure in speech variability”. 

Workshop Website:

https://colincwilson.github.io/labphon15workshop/call.html

A fundamental challenge for the theory of speech perception is to explain how listeners successfully map signals that vary extensively across talkers to a common set of sounds and words. Discovery of higher-order structure in phonetic and phonological variation — patterns of variation that transcend individual phonetic or phonological units, and that can be encoded by a relatively small number of talker-specific parameters — could provide the key for understanding the robustness of speech perception and patterns of generalization observed in talker adaptation.

We invite submissions on higher-order structure in phonetic / phonological variation across talkers or on the relation between structured talker variation and speech perception. Students are especially encouraged to submit. We hope to have a mix of oral and poster presentations and plenty of time for discussion. 

Submissions for talk or poster presentations, in pdf format and no longer than two pages, should be sent by April 30th directly to one of the co-organizers: Meghan (meghan.clayards@mcgill.ca) or Colin (colin.wilson@jhu.edu)

Call for Papers:

We welcome abstracts for talks of 40 minutes (including questions) on any aspect of phonological representation and computation from an internalist, nativist, symbol-processing perspective.

Abstract guidelines:

Revised Deadline: March 7, 2016
Format: pdf file
Length: 2-5 pages
Submission by email to cognitivescience@concordia.ca

Anonymous abstract with following info in message:

– Name and affiliation of author(s) (Alphabetically, in case of multiple authors)
– Status of each author (student, post-doc, professor, etc)
– Poster–YES/NO? Are you willing to present your research in a POSTER? (Your answer will not affect your chances of acceptance for a talk)

Results will be sent out before March 15.

Further information will be made available at

http://linguistics.concordia.ca/naphc9/

The deadline for the 2016 edition of the RFP conference has been extended to March 14.
More details available here:

http://rfp2016.sciencesconf.org

Kind regards
The RFP 2016 organizing committee

———————————————–
———————————————–

The French Phonology Network (Réseau français de phonologie) is launching a call for papers for its 2016 annual conference. Building on the success of the conferences organized in Orléans (2010), Tours (2011), Paris (2012), Nantes (2013), Lille (2014) and Bordeaux (2015), the 2016 edition will take place from 30 June to 2 July at the Université Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France.

The conference is sponsored by the research laboratory « Bases, Corpus & Langage », UMR 7320.

We are pleased to announce that the following researchers have accepted invitations to give keynote talks:

-Patrick Honeybone, Univ. Edinburgh

-Philippe Ségéral, Univ. Paris vii

-Péter Szigetvári, Univ. Eötvös Loránd (Budapest)

Main session

Submissions are welcome from linguists working in any school or theoretical framework. Topics of interest may relate to phonology in general or propose a phonological analysis of a linguistic phenomenon in a specific language. Topics may focus on, but are not limited to, signal processing, perception, acquisition, diachrony, dialectology, formalism, epistemology, descriptive phonology and all issues which explicitly deal with phonology and its interfaces.

Thematic session

This year, we particularly encourage communications focusing on dialectology and/or diachrony.

Variation in time and space:

1) variation in space. Dialectologists and phonologists usually have similar concerns: understand a process, describe a given system, explain a change and, possibly, make a theoretical proposal. The prisms of each other do not always entirely superimpose: among phonologists, there are those who rather aim to model, evaluate theories, focus on representations and, among dialectologists, there are those who rather show interest in data collection, in typology, in reconstruction. This difference in perspective is far from being a problem. On the contrary, it is a real good thing: exchanges between them can only be fruitful. For those, among dialectologists and phonologists, who are used to making incursions into their respective fields, this thematic session is an additional occasion for them for exchanging and confronting points of view.

2) variation in time. Exchanges between specialists in diachrony and phonologists mainly concerned with synchrony are well established and the  need for such exchanges is something broadly accepted. This thematic session is an extra occasion for them to fully take advantage of their complementarity.

Some trails/questions :

–dialectology does not restrict to Romance dialectology, i.e. all linguistic areas are welcome.

-how can the tools proposed by a given phonological theory allow a better comprehension of certain dialectal data?

-how can dialectal data shed light on a theoretical proposal?

-how can geographical variation shed light on variation in time (and reciprocally)?

…

Abstract submission and review

Abstracts can be written in either French or English. Abstracts should not exceed two pages in length (A4 pages, TimesNewRoman or similar, 12 point), including all examples, figures and references. PDF abstracts should be submitted on the RFP2016 site at the following address : http://rfp2016.sciencesconf.org.

All abstracts will undergo anonymous review by at least two referees.

Presentation

Oral presentations will be scheduled for 35-minute time slots (25 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion).

Important dates

Deadline for submission: 14 March 2016

Notification of acceptance: 15 April 2016

Conference: 30 June to 2 July 2016

The program and information on MOLT 2016 (the Montreal-Ottawa-Laval-Toronto Phonology workshop) is now available:

https://sites.google.com/site/carletonmolt2016/

Hope to see you at MOLT! Please contact Lev Blumenfeld (lev dot blumenfeld at carleton dot ca) if you have questions about the workshop.

The 9th North American Phonology Conference (NAPhC9) will be held

May 7-8, 2016 at Concordia University in Montreal.

Invited speakers for NAPhC9 are

• Eric Bakovic (UCSan Diego)

• Karthik Durvasula (Michigan State University)

We welcome abstracts for talks of 40 minutes (including questions)  on any aspect of phonological representation and computation from an internalist, nativist, symbol-processing perspective.

Abstract guidelines:

• Deadline: March 1st, 2016
• Format: pdf file
• Length: 2-5 pages
• Submission by email to cognitivescience@concordia.ca
• Anonymous abstract with following info in message:

• Name and affiliation of author(s) (Alphabetically, in case of multiple authors)
• Status of each author (student, post-doc, professor, etc)
• Poster–YES/NO? Are you willing to present your research in a POSTER? (Your answer will not affect your chances of acceptance for a talk)

Results will be sent out before March 15th.

Further information will be made available at

http://linguistics.concordia.ca/naphc9/

Twenty-Fourth Manchester Phonology Meeting  http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/mfm/24mfm.html

26-28 MAY 2016, Deadline for abstracts: 15th February 2016

Special session: ‘Evidence in phonology’, featuring (in alphabetical order):
* William Idsardi (University of Maryland)
* Janet Pierrehumbert (University of Oxford)
* Sharon Rose (University of California, San Diego)

Discussant:
*  Adam Albright (MIT)

NB: there will also be a FRINGE workshop on the afternoon of Wednesday 25th May, timed to coincide with the mfm, entitled ‘Computation and learnability in phonological theory’ – details of this can be found here:
https://sites.google.com/site/24mfmfringe/

The 2016 Annual Meeting on Phonology will be held at the University of Southern California October 21-23, 2016. Further details, including the abstract deadline, will be announced shortly. More information on the AMP conference series can be found here.

From Peggy Renwick

Call for papers
Satellite Workshop: “Tools for Big Data in Laboratory Phonology”
Abstract deadline: 26 February 2016
Notification: 15 March 2016

We are pleased to announce a special workshop showcasing and providing hands-on experience with tools for working with large datasets in Laboratory Phonology. This workshop will be held immediately preceding LabPhon15 at Cornell University, on Wednesday, 13 July 2016, and further information is available at http://mlmlab.org/bigphon.

Research in laboratory phonology is increasingly scaling up to large datasets, from diverse sources, such as speech corpora, crowdsourced data, or experiments carried out across multiple laboratories. The size and complexity of these datasets make technical tools (e.g. for forced aligners, database systems, automatic phonetic measurement) crucial for working with them. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together the users and the developers of such tools, and to meet the needs of both groups. Users (workshop participants) will gain knowledge about a range of state-of-the-art tools, have hands-on experience using them, and be able to access real-time help from the tools’ developers (workshop presenters), who will in turn have a platform for the dissemination of their tools and feedback on ways to improve them for increased use in the LabPhon community. The workshop will also provide an opportunity to discuss the utility and future development of existing or additional tools.

We invite proposals from tool developers who would like to present in this workshop. We welcome submissions on tools that might be useful for any aspect of working with large datasets in Laboratory Phonology, including (but not limited to): constructing, organizing, and searching phonetic and phonological corpora (e.g. forced aligners, database systems); automating phonetic and textual annotation (e.g. prosodic structure, VOT, part-of-speech tags); deriving and extracting acoustic- or transcription-based measures (e.g. F0, formants, neighborhood densities, phoneme distributions).

Before the workshop, developers will provide access to their tools, including basic documentation and a sample dataset; these will be linked from the workshop web page. During the workshop, developers will give a tutorial on their tool, introducing its purpose and capabilities and illustrating its usage through examples. Developers will also be present for unstructured time where participants practice using the tool(s) of their choice on their own projects, with individualized help from developers as needed.

We anticipate accepting no more than six proposals in the interest of providing sufficient time for developers to showcase their tool and for participants to gain hands-on experience using it.

Proposals no longer than two pages, including figures and references, should be submitted to Kathleen Currie Hall at kathleen.hall@ubc.ca. Each proposal should include a description of the tool to be presented, its utility for working with large phonetic/phonological datasets, and an explanation of the kinds of hands-on examples that could be provided during the workshop.