Keynote speakers
Professor Marija Tabain, La Trobe University
Talk title: A Consideration of the Consonant Chart in the International Phonetic Alphabet
** This talk is based on a paper co-authored by Marc Garellek from the University of California San Diego and Matthew Gordon from the University of California Santa Barbara. A full version of the paper will be available in the conference proceedings. **
In this paper we outline various problems with the current IPA consonant chart, based on the study of an ever-increasing number of languages. We propose a revised version of the chart, which has many similarities with the pre-1989 version of the chart, but which at the same time shows innovations. We particularly focus on the laryngeal sounds; the epiglottal and pharyngeal sounds; the retroflexes; the sibilant fricatives; and the semi-vowels. We hope that our discussion will be useful to both researchers and pedagogues, and we hope that our proposed revisions are logical from the phonetic and phonological points of view.
Dr Rosey Billington, Australian National University
Inaugural Anne Cutler LectureTalk title: Phonetic typology, and what we know and don’t know about the sounds of the world’s languages
Within the phonetic sciences, an overarching goal is to understand human speech and the fundamentals of spoken language communication. However, for the vast majority of the world’s spoken languages, there is little to no phonetic detail available on speech production patterns. Although there has been increasing interest in phonological typology, we know relatively little about phonetic typology – how the ‘same sound’ or ‘same kind of contrast’ is implemented across diverse languages. In addition, because a small subset of largely European languages represent the bulk of phonetic research, particular kinds of speech sounds have been the focus, and accordingly have the most well-developed methodologies. Taking stock of current knowledge and discussing recent findings, I highlight the need to expand the depth and breadth of the empirical base in order to better understand the design space of spoken languages, and outline considerations for ongoing research.
Associate Professor Sasha Calhoun, Victoria University of Wellington
Talk title: The interplay of prosodic and syntactic cues in English and Mandarin focus processing
Focus plays a key role in speech processing and comprehension: focused words are attended to and processed more deeply, remembered better and generate contrastive alternatives which often relate to intended implicatures of the utterance. Prosodic prominence is well-known to be a key marker of focus in many languages. However, there are other important morphosyntactic markers, including syntactic clefting. There is still much to be understood about how these interact in processing. In this talk, I give an overview of psycholinguistic studies I have been involved in looking at the processing of prosodic and syntactic cues to focus in English and Mandarin Chinese. While there are clear similarities in the key focus markers in these languages, I outline interesting differences in how these cues are weighted by listeners in each language, as well as across different experimental tasks. These show a complex interplay of cues to focus.
Associate Professor Lynn Clark, University of Canterbury
SocioPhonAus4
Talk title: Understanding co-variation in speech production and perception
The root of the work I’ll talk about is the finding that was published in Brand, Hay, Clark, Watson, & Sóskuthy (2021) - in NZE at least, speakers can be identified as leaders or laggers in multiple ongoing sound changes. After summarising this work, I’ll spend most of the talk exploring this further. First, I’ll present work that explores how stable a speaker’s patterns of covariation are over real time and whether these leaders and laggers of sound changes remain leaders and laggers. I’ll show that over real time, there is significant stability across two unique vowel clusters, suggesting that speakers’ covariation position within their community remains stable over time, regardless of speakers’ changes in the realisation of specific vowel variables. In the second part of the talk, I’ll explore whether the patterns of co-varying vowels identified in speech production also surface as perceptually salient to NZ listeners. I’ll present results from a free-classification task showing that there are perceptual dimensions (established using multidimensional scaling analysis) that are predicted by the covarying subsystems of vowels identified by Brand et al. (2021) in speech production. This suggests that covarying vowel patterns can carry social meaning. In the final study, I’ll present results from a pairwise comparison experiment that continues to explore the social meaning of vowel clusters and the interaction between vowel clusters, pitch, articulation rate and creak.
