The Neuro-cognition of Developmental Disorders Affecting Language (NDDAL) Workshop

The Neuro-cognition of Developmental Disorders Affecting Language (NDDAL) Workshop will take place on 9 July 2013, in Newcastle Upon Tyne. NDDAL is sponsored by the British Academy in partnership with Newcastle University. This workshop aims to bring together world-leading experts and established researchers, as well as early-career researchers, post-doctoral and post-graduate researchers interested in various cognitive and neural aspects of developmental disorders affecting language, particularly Developmental Dyslexia and Specific Language Impairment, but also Autism Spectrum Disorders, Tourette Syndrome, ADHD, and Williams Syndrome.

Further information: http://nddal.weebly.com/
Contact: NDDAL2013@gmail.com

Also see: NDDAL2013_flyer

‘Communication Disorders across Languages’ book series

Our series was founded due to a coincidence. The coincidence was that we were at the same conference as Mike and Marjukka Grover ten years ago: the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, at Arizona State University, Tempe, in 2003. We had both been involved with work in multilingualism but were earning our livings as clinical linguists and, in discussions with Mike and Marjukka, we came to realize that the intersection between these two fields really needed more attention; indeed, it needed a book series! As it’s now ten years since those initial discussions, and we are about to publish the tenth book in the series, now would seem to be a good time for a retrospective.

From the outset we envisioned two main themes for the series: that would result in books with two different approaches. One theme would involve studies of particular geographical areas and/or languages and explore what speech and language pathology resources and research were available for the multilingual population of that area or speakers of that language. As an example, our very first volume was devoted to Spanish speakers (both in  Europe and the New World): Communication Disorders in Spanish Speakers: Theoretical, Research and Clinical Aspects edited by José G. Centeno, Raquel T. Anderson, and Loraine K. Obler in 2007. This book was timely, as the increasing number of Spanish speakers, or bilingual Spanish-English speakers in the U.S. has highlighted the paucity of speech language therapy services through the medium of Spanish. The book aims to contribute to  evidence-based clinical procedures for monolingual Spanish and bilingual Spanish-English children and adults with communication disorders, and was one of the first to appear in this area.

Other books in the series that followed this path are Research in Logopedics: Speech and Language Therapy in Finland, edited by Anu Klippi and Kaisa Launonen in 2008; Language Disorders in Speakers of Chinese, edited by Sam-Po Law, Brendan Weekes and Anita M.-Y. Wong also in 2008; and Communication Disorders in Turkish, edited by Seyhun Topbaş and Mehmet Yavaş, published in 2010. There are still potentially fascinating areas to explore in this part of the series, and we hope one day to commission volumes dealing with, for example, South Africa, India, and Russia.

The second theme takes a specific area within the field of communication disorders and examines multilingual and crosslinguistic aspects of that area. In the beginning we envisioned a dozen or so such areas from developmental speech and language disorders through to acquired neurogenic impairments. So far, six books have appeared following this theme. The first was Multilingual Aspects of Fluency Disorders, edited by Peter Howell & John Van Borsel, 2011: the first volume to examine stuttering and related fluency impairments from a multilingual viewpoint. This collection has been followed by books on children’s speech disorders, aphasia, voice disorders, and – most recently – literacy. Sharynne McLeod and Brian Goldstein edited Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children which appeared in 2012; later in 2012 was published Aspects of Multilingual Aphasia, edited by Martin Gitterman, Mira Goral and Loraine Obler. This was followed in early 2013 by International Perspectives on Voice Disorders, with Edwin Yiu as editor. Our most recent volume is Researching Dyslexia in Multilingual Settings: Diverse Perspectives, edited by Deirdre Martin. Volumes on Sign Language, child language disorders, and motor speech disorders are also in preparation, with still other areas at the planning stage (e.g. traumatic brain injury, and specific language impairment).

Interestingly, as the series has developed, a third theme has emerged: assessment and multilingualism. This theme covers both the provision of assessment materials in a range of languages (many of which have had little in the way of communicative disorders assessment provision in the past), and the assessment of multilingual clients. The first book in this theme was Assessing Grammar: The Languages of LARSP, edited by Martin Ball, David Crystal and Paul Fletcher, which extended the LARSP grammatical analysis profile to 12 languages other than English. Future volumes are planned that will cover up to another 40 languages. Another collection within this theme is in an advanced state of preparation; its working title is Methods for assessing multilingual children:  disentangling bilingualism from Language Impairment, and is being edited by Sharon Armon-Lotem, Jan de Jong and Natalia Meir. We hope to encourage further submissions within this theme.

What of the future? As noted, we have already commissioned further books for the series, and several of these are near completion. There is one development we have been considering, however. Interesting work within multilingualism and communication disorders that does not fit within a single edited collection currently has to struggle for space within the academic journals, and such work does not always fit within the dominant research paradigms. We have been considering whether a ‘yearbook’ format might prove a suitable home for such work, and whether something like this could be produced cheaply enough to interest Multilingual Matters – watch this space!

Martin J. Ball and Nicole Müller Series editors, Communication Disorders across Languages

This blog entry also appears on the MM Blog.

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 27 (6-7)

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics
Volume 27, Number 6-7 (July 2013) Special Issue: Proceedings of the 14^th Meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association: 2

Editorial

Alice Lee and Fiona Gibbon

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics July, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 393-393.

What explains the reductions in /s/-clusters: Sonority or [continuant]?

Mehmet Yavaş

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 394-403.

Longitudinal comparison of early speech and language milestones in children with cleft palate: A comparison of US and Slovak children

Nancy J. Scherer, Zuzana Oravkinova, and Matthew T. McBee

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 404-418.

The linguistically aware teacher and the teacher-aware linguist

Elspeth McCartney and Sue Ellis

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 419-427.

Preschool children’s performance on Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C)

Fiona E. Gibbon and Heather Smyth

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 428-434.

Imageability of Norwegian nouns, verbs and adjectives in a cross-linguistic perspective

Hanne Gram Simonsen, Marianne Lind, Pernille Hansen, Elisabeth Holm, and Bjørn-Helge Mevik

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 435-446.

The development of falling intonation in young children with cochlear implants: a 2-year longitudinal study

David P. Snow and David J. Ertmer

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 447-458.

Early lexical expression in typically developing Maltese children: implications for the identification of language delay

Daniela Gatt, Helen Grech, and Barbara Dodd

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 459-471.

Cortical auditory evoked potentials in unsuccessful cochlear implant users

Boška Munivrana and Vesna Mildner

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 472-483.

A normative-speaker validation study of two indices developed to quantify tongue dorsum activity from midsagittal tongue shapes

Natalia Zharkova

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 484-496.

Lexical and child-related factors in word variability and accuracy in infants

Toby Macrae

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 497-507.

The influence of the frequency of functional markers on repetitive imitation of syntactic constructions in children with specific language impairment, from their own language productions

Sandrine Leroy, Christophe Parisse, and Christelle Maillart

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 508-520.

Tracking change in children with severe and persisting speech difficulties

Elisabeth Joy Newbold, Joy Stackhouse, and Bill Wells

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 521-539.

Intervention for improving comprehension in 4–6 year old children with specific language impairment: practicing inferencing is a good thing

Chantal Desmarais, Line Nadeau, Natacha Trudeau, Paméla Filiatrault-Veilleux, and Catherine Maxès-Fournier

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 6-7: 540-552

Why, Oh Y?

It’s exam time again – so howlers abound. One of the best (worst?) from yesterday’s undergraduate speech disorders in children exam follows! Asked to list the target phoneme to errored realization in a data set, one student informed me that target /y/ in ‘sorry’ had been realized as [i]. Aaaargh!!!

PhD Scholarship: l’Université catholique de Louvain

PhD scholarship on fluency and disfluency markers in oral French, oral English and ‘langue signée (français de Belgique)’

Subject: [Thèse] appel à candidature : “Fluency and disfluency markers”

Pour compléter notre équipe sur le projet “Fluency and disfluency markers. A multimodal contrastive perspective” l’Institut Langage et Communication de l’Université catholique de Louvain (Belgique) est à la recherche d’un(e) assistant(e) de recherche pour réaliser une thèse de doctorat portant sur les marqueurs prosodiques de fluence et de disfluence en français. Le/La candidat(e) retenu(e) travaillera en collaboration avec les autres membres du projet dont l’objectif est d’étudier les marqueurs de fluence et disfluence en langue orale et signée dans trois modalités différentes : le discours en langue première (français et anglais), le discours en langue seconde (anglais) et la langue signée (français de Belgique).
La thèse portant sur la (dis)fluence prosodique sera encadrée par les
professeures Anne Catherine Simon et Liesbeth Degand au sein du centre de recherche Valibel – Discours et Variation.

Profil:
- Master en linguistique française (avec grade)
- Maitrise (quasi) native du français, très bonne connaissance de
l’anglais académique
- Bonnes connaissances en statistiques linguistiques
- Formation en linguistique de corpus (outils et méthodes)
- Dynamisme et motivation
- Indépendance et esprit de collaboration
- Une expérience dans l’analyse du français parlé et/ou en analyse du
discours est un atout
Nous offrons :
- Un contrat à durée déterminée de 4 ans
- Un environnement de recherche stimulant avec de nombreuses opportunités de collaboration
- Un salaire mensuel consistant en une bourse de recherche comprenant la
sécurité sociale (+/- 1600€ net/mois)

Début du contrat: Au plus tard le 1er septembre 2013
Date limite pour les candidatures: 15 juillet 2013

Si cette offre vous intéresse, merci de nous faire parvenir une lettre de
motivation, un CV et deux recommandations académiques sous format électronique à:

Prof. Anne Catherine Simon (anne-catherine.simon@uclouvain.be)

Informations complémentaires:
Institut Langage et Communication: http://www.uclouvain.be/ilc
Projet sur la (dis)fluence: http://www.uclouvain.be/415256.html
Valibel – Discours & Variation: http://www.uclouvain.be/valibel

–
Alice Bardiaux
Université catholique de Louvain
Centre de recherche VALIBEL – Discours et Variation
Collège Erasme – Place Blaise Pascal 1, boîte L3.03.33
B – 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
+32 (0)10/47.45.98
alice.bardiaux@uclouvain.be

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics Volume 27, Number 5 (May 2013)

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics
Volume 27, Number 5 (May 2013)

 

The impact of extrinsic demographic factors on Cantonese speech acquisition

Carol K. S. To, Pamela S. P. Cheung, and Sharynne Mcleod

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 5: 323-338.

 

Speech perception and lexical effects in specific language impairment

Richard G. Schwartz, Frances L. V. Scheffler, and Karece Lopez

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 5: 339-354.

 

Sentence comprehension in Swahili–English bilingual agrammatic speakers

Tom O. Abuom, Emmah Shah, and Roelien Bastiaanse

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 5: 355-370.

 

The relationship of phonological skills to language skills in Spanish–English-speaking bilingual children

Solaman J. Cooperson, Lisa M. Bedore, and Elizabeth D. Peña

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27, No. 5: 371-389.

 

ELEVENTH OLD WORLD CONFERENCE IN PHONOLOGY (OCP 11)

ELEVENTH OLD WORLD CONFERENCE IN PHONOLOGY (OCP 11) 
Link for abstract submission: http://linguistlist.org/confservices/customhome.cfm?emeetingid=5102JA4458BE425A40A050441
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Meertens Instituut Amsterdam

22-25 JANUARY 2014

Deadline for abstracts: 15 September 2013
First call for papers: 29 April 2013
Second call for papers: 15 July 2013
Last call for papers: 1 September 2013
Notification of acceptance: 1 November 2013
Main conference: 23-25 January
Pre-conference workshop: 22 January

Invited speakers:
Adamantios I. Gafos (University of Potsdam)
Silke Hamann (University of Amsterdam)
Alan Prince (Rutgers University)

The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and the Meertens Instituut Amsterdam are proud to announce that the eleventh Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP 11) will take place in Leiden and Amsterdam from 23 to 25 January 2014. It is organised by a group of local phonologists and follows in the line of previous OCP conferences, which have been held in Leiden, Tromsø, Budapest, Rhodes, Toulouse, Edinburgh, Nice, Marrakech, Berlin, and Istanbul. Abstracts for presentation as either talks or poster papers can be submitted on any phonological issue (theoretical or empirical).

The conference will be preceded by a workshop on the relationship between phonetics and phonology on 22 January. Everyone attending the conference is very welcome to attend the workshop, too.

For the main conference, we invite abstracts either for an oral presentation of 20 minutes (followed by 10 minutes of discussion) or for poster presentation.

For the workshop, we invite submission of abstracts for an oral presentation of 20 minutes (followed by 10 minutes of discussion).

Abstracts must be anonymous and no longer than two pages, including examples and references. Submissions are restricted to one single-authored and one co-authored abstract. The conference language is English: abstracts and talks will be in English.
Page format: A4, 2,54 cm (one inch) margins on all sides, 12-point font, single line spacing.
File format: .pdf.
File name:
For submissions for the main conference: [title-main.pdf]
For submissions for the workshop: [title-workshop.pdf]

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

During the last years a special attention has been devoted to the relationship between phonetics and phonology. However, most of the questions dealing with the role of phonetics in formal models of phonology are still unanswered. As a matter of illustration, some of these questions are the following: are phonological features grounded in phonetics, or are they substance-free? If features are grounded in phonetics, are they based on articulation or acoustics? Is the mapping between the phonological output and phonetics a direct or an indirect one? Should functional explanations of phonological patterns be included in formal phonology, or are synchronic phonological patterns just phonetically arbitrary, meaning that those explanations do not belong to grammar but to other theories such as sound change? How is metrical structure reflected in phonetics? (How) should phonetic variation in the speech signal be captured in phonological theory?

Local organizers:
Chair: Björn Köhnlein
Bert Botma
Ben Hermans
Frans Hinskens
Peter Jurgec
Claartje Levelt
Kathrin Linke
Etske Ooijevaar
Marc van Oostendorp
Marijn van ‘t Veer
Secretary: Francesc Torres-Tamarit

Seventh Christian Benoît Award

Seventh Christian Benoît Award
**********Deadline has been postponed to May 20, 2013*******

The Christian Benoît Award is delivered periodically by the Association Christian Benoit (**). It is given to promising young scientists in the domain of SPEECH and FACE-TO-FACE COMMUNICATION. It can concern basic or applied research projects.

The Award provides the elected scientist with financial support for the development of a short-term research project that
(1) illustrates concretely the achievements of her/his research work
(2) could help promoting this work in the scientific community and to Grant Agencies
(3) gives an overall view of the state of the art in the research domain.
The proposed research project can have the form of a demonstrator, a technical product or of a pedagogical multi-media product (Movie, Web-site, interactive software…).
The Award is valued at 7,500 Euros.

The commitments of the elected scientist are:
–  to attend the Interspeech2013 Conference in Lyon, France
–  to deliver the final product of the project within 2 years
–  to present her/his results in a workshop such as, among others, AVSP, ISSP, or SpeechProsody.

In the application, the candidate should provide
– a statement of research interests,
– a detailed curriculum vitae
– a description of the proposed short-term research project. The description should include a presentation of the scientific and/or pedagogical objectives and of the methodological aspects, a link with the former research work of the applicant, as well as a detailed description of the provisional budget.

Applications will be evaluated by an international committee including experts in the field of Speech and Face-to-Face communications and representatives of the Institutions supporting the award.

Applications should be sent to
Pascal Perrier: Pascal.Perrier@gipsa-lab.grenoble-inp.fr
before Monday May 20, 2013
. Electronic submissions are mandatory.

The successful candidate will be notified by June 17, 2013. The Award will be delivered at the Interspeech 2013 Conference in Lyon (France) (http://www.interspeech2013.org/

For further information, please contact Pascal Perrier.

—————————————————————————————————————————————-
* 3,500 Euros will be given immediately; the remaining 4,000 Euros will be available at reception of the multi-media project by the Christian Benoit Association. Travel and registration costs necessary to attend the Interspeech 2011 Conference will have to be paid on this grant.
** For details about the Association Christian Benoît and the past awardees of the Christian Benoît Award see http://www.gipsa-lab.fr/acb/
–
Kayla Hewitt
Administrative Assistant
Association for Laboratory Phonology

Phonetically balanced passages – the north wind and the sun?

Since my original request for phonetically balanced passages in languages other than English, I have received several messages suggesting the use of the North Wind and the Sun story. This exists in many languages, as popularized by the publications of the IPA over many decades. Indeed, several correspondents noted that they used this passage, and a variety of languages were cited.

I have to admit to being somewhat depressed with these responses. The North Wind and the Sun story was never claimed to be phonetically balanced for English (e.g. there are some phonemes of English missing from the story) but, even if it were, what makes people think that versions in other languages would be? Surely we’ve moved beyond the “just translate it from one language and it’ll work in another” way of thinking?

I feel the choice of this passage displays a lack of understanding of what a ‘phonetically balanced passage’ actually is. Such a passage ideally should contain:
1. All the phonemes of the language
2. Main subphonemic variants
3. Sounds in main structural positions (initial – final; clusters, etc)
4. Sounds in relative frequency as in the spoken language.

While such an ideal may well be hard to meet in a passage of a manageable size, there must surely be better alternatives than translating a not-very-phonetically-balanced passage from another language…?

Phonetically balanced passages need to be carefully devised for the specific language, and it’s high time we put the north wind where the sun don’t shine!

Features in Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Semantics: What are they?

Call for papers:

Features in Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Semantics: What are they?

University of Tromsø/CASTL

Date: 31 October and 1 November 2013

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 June 2013

Organizers/contact: Martin Krämer, Peter Svenonius

Conference email: features@hsl.uit.no

Conference webpage:

https://castl.uit.no/index.php/component/content/article/76-other-castl-events/conferencesaworkshops/292-features

Invited speakers:

Elan Dresher

Daniel Harbour

Elizabeth Ritter

Wendy Sandler

All formal models of linguistics assume sets of features in terms of which generalizations can be stated. But the nature of the features themselves is often not explicitly addressed. In this conference we focus on the nature of features across phonology and syntax and related domains of linguistics.

One group of questions concerns the ‘grounding’ of features in substance or content. For example, phonological features may be grounded in phonetics, and syntactic features may be grounded in semantics. Innatist traditions have sometimes posited innate universal inventories of grounded features. The ‘substance-free’ movement in phonology argues instead that the formal properties of features can and should be radically dissociated from their grounding in content. Sign language phonology would seem to support this position, as the featural system of sign language phonology operates with a completely different set of articulators from those used in spoken languages. Minimalist syntax also frequently promotes the dissociation of formal properties of features from their content (as in the proposal that tense is simply one of a variety of ways in which Infl may be ‘grounded,’ favored in Indo-European languages but with various other languages opting for other content for Infl). Such proposals raise many questions concerning how feature systems are constrained to be uniform across languages and to what extent they are free to vary. The radically opposing view in phonology denies the existence of categorical features altogether and attempts to model phonological patterns as statistical computation of phonetic data.

The formal structure of features raises another set of questions. Complex patterns of feature locality gave rise to feature geometries in phonology, and these have been developed further to account for dependencies among features, not only in phonology but also in syntax. Cartographic work typically assumes linear hierarchies. To what extent are the various geometries and hierarchies motivated, and how might they be grounded in a broader explanatory theory?

Interacting with these questions about the “geometric” relations among features is the algebraic structure of the features. For example, it is often assumed that privativity, in which opposition is marked by presence versus absence, is conceptually simplest and therefore the zero hypothesis. While in phonology the pendulum currently swings towards privativity, recently arguments have come from morphosyntax that features have binary values. While apparent ternary patterns in phonology have been taken as arguments in favor of binarity, such patterns have more recently been accounted for by reference to class nodes. Theories such as HPSG or Government Phonology assume much more complex relations among features (with HPSG even allowing feature-value matrices in which the values are feature-value matrices, extending to a kind of feature recursion, and GP positing government and licensing relations between features and positions).

In this 2-day conference we invite international researchers to address these and other questions about the nature of features in linguistic theory.

We are looking forward to receiving your abstract for a 30 minute talk addressing the issues sketched above. Abstracts should not exceed two A4 pages with 2.5 cm margins.

Abstracts should be submitted as pdf files through easyabs.

http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/features13

There will be a limited budget to provide support for travel expenses for graduate students and post-docs with no research funds from their home institution. In case your abstract is accepted, you may apply for support.