SUW23: Speech Units Workshop Zurich, Switzerland, April 17-19, 2023 |
Conference website | https://sites.google.com/view/speechunitsworkshop/call-dates?authuser=0 |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=suw23 |
Abstract registration deadline | November 15, 2022 |
Submission deadline | November 15, 2022 |
Topic description:
Language endangerment is a topic of concern and the interest in language documentation has grown (Himmelmann 1998, 2006; Thieberger 2020). With the technological advent language documentation has extended to include more speech data. However, the number of instrumental studies dealing with the acoustic characteristics of under-documented languages remains relatively small. This workshop offers a forum for the discussion of the experimental study of Speech Units and aims at providing training for those interested in engaging with the topic.
Instrumental studies in intonational phonology have shown that languages vary in how they phonetically encode units of different sizes, such as the prosodic word, the accentual phrase, or the intermediate phrase (Jun 2006, Jun 2014). Despite great advances contributing new insights into the field of prosodic typology, studies dealing quantitively with more diverse languages remain under-represented. There is a need for more data and studies from more diverse languages to better understand typological variability and e.g., why some languages mark units on metrically strong heads, while others prioritise edges of larger units and whether this has an impact on language segmentation processes or first language acquisition.
From an acquisition perspective, studies on several Western-European languages have shown that children can package and process their input into larger units such as clauses at around 6 months of age (Nazzi et al. 2000 for English, Schmitz et al 2003 for German, Johnson & Seidl 2008 for Dutch). Later, children are able to segment the speech stream into smaller speech units such as words, using the salience of utterance edges (Seidl & Johnson 2006) and the rhythm, i.e., syllable vs foot, and phonotactic properties, such as vowel harmony (Nihan Ketrez 2014), of their target language. This order of segmentation from larger clauses to smaller units, and the types of cues identified remain to be investigated in more typologically diverse languages.
The whole-word phonology approach (Vihman & Croft 2007) is an emergentist approach to early phonological development, according to which children do not first learn the individual elements composing words, such as morphemes or affixes etc., but instead start by trying to produce whole words. To date, most studies were carried out on speech production of European languages (but see Khattab and Al-Tamimi 2013 for Arabic, and Ota 2013 for Japanese), and data is still lacking on other languages.
Call for papers:
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.
Submission deadline: 15th November 2022
Date of notification: 23rd December 2022
Potential research questions include (but are not limited to):
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How are speech units marked phonetically and phonologically in diverse languages?
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What prominence patterns are found cross-linguistically? (e.g., head or edge marking)
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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?
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Do children initially segment larger units (clauses before words) in all languages?
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Does the whole-word phonology approach hold across typologically diverse languages?
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How do children learn to segment and produce syllables in foot and syllable-timed languages?
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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. The number of participants is limited, and applicants are kindly requested to express their interest to participate by 15th January 2023.
It is not mandatory to present a paper if a participant wishes to be part of the hands-on session.