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foNETiks
A newsletter for
The International Phonetic Association
and for the Phonetic Sciences
July 2014
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Linda Shockey, University of Reading, UK
Gerry Docherty, Griffith University, Australia
Lisa Lim, The University of Hong Kong
Rachel Smith, University of Glasgow, UK
E-mail address: fonetiks-request at jiscmail.ac.uk
The foNETiks archive can be found on the WWW at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/fonetiks.html
Visit the IPA web page at http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk
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ANNOUNCEMENTS
[new ones marked ##, with further information below]
[date of first appearance follows]
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11-15 August 2014. Instrumental Articulatory Phonetics and Dialectological Fieldwork: Strange Bedfellows? (Workshop session of Methods in Dialectology XV). Groningen, The Netherlands. etske.ooijevaar {AT} meertens.knaw.nl (03/14)
## 15-17 August 2014. Leiden Conference on Word Stress / Word Accent. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Leiden, Netherlands. http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucl/stress-and-accent/ (02/14, 07/14)
18-21 August 2014. 1st International DINAFON Meeting. State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. http://www.dinafon.iel.unicamp.br/eng/events/dinafon2014/main (04/14)
1-3 September 2014. 23rd annual conference of the International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA 2014). Zurich, Switzerland. www.pholab.uzh.ch/iafpa2014.html (04/14)
3-5 September 2014. Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology (LARP-7). Aix-en-Provence, France. http://larp7.sciencesconf.org (01/14)
## 5 September 2014. Forensic Linguistics/ Phonetics Student Day. Session of the German Society for Forensic Linguistics (GSFL) 2014. Mainz, Germany. http://www.gsfl.info (07/14)
5-6 September 2014. Sixth Annual Conference: Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching (PSLLT). Santa Barbara, California, USA. http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/PSLLT2014 (11/13)
5-7 September 2014. Germanic Society for Forensic Linguistics Roundtable in Forensic Linguistics 2014. Mainz, Germany. http://www.gsfl.info/roundtable--14.html (06/14)
## 8-12 September 2014. 17th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD). Brno, Czech Republic. http://www.tsdconference.org/tsd2014 (07/14)
10-11 September 2014. 3rd Swiss Workshop on Prosody (SWIP). Geneva, Switzerland. http://www.unige.ch/lettres/linguistique/actualites/swip2014_en.html (09/13)
10-12 September 2014. 6th Conference on Tone and Intonation in Europe (TIE6). Utrecht, The Netherlands. http://www.tie2014.com (02/14)
11-12 September 2014. Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia (SLAM 2014). (Satellite event of the 15th Annual Conference Interspeech, Singapore.) Penang, Malaysia. http://language.cs.usm.my/SLAM2014/ (03/14)
11-14 September 2014. The Perception of Non-Native Varieties: Methods and Findings in Perceptual Dialectology. 47th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. http://sle2014.eu/ (11/13)
11-14 September 2014. Acquisition of Third Language Phonology. Poznań, Poland. http://sle2014.eu/ (11/13)
11-14 September 2014. Phonetic Reduction and Reduction Processes. 47th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. http://sle2014.eu/ (11/13)
11-14 September 2014. Non-Automatic Alternations in Phonology. 47th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. http://sle2014.eu/ (11/13)
12-14 September 2014. The 9th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP). Singapore. http://www.iscslp2014.org (03/14)
14-18 September 2014. 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2014): Celebrating diversity of languages. Singapore. http://www.interspeech2014.org/ (11/13)
18-20 September 2014. (Phonetic) Building Blocks of Speech (PBBS). Victoria, BC, Canada. http://web.uvic.ca/ling/pbbs/ (09/13)
18-20 September 2014. Bias in Auditory Perception. Aarhus, Denmark. http://interactingminds.au.dk/events/single-events/artikel/bias-in-auditory-perception (06/14)
## 19 September 2014. Bias in Speech Perception. Special session of Bias in Auditory Perception (see entry above). Aarhus, Denmark. http://interactingminds.au.dk/events/single-events/artikel/bias-in-auditory-perception (07/14)
## 19-21 September 2014. Phonology 2014 – Annual Meeting on Phonology. Cambridge, MA, USA. (07/14)
25-27 September 2014. 22nd Czech-German Workshop on Speech Communication. Prague, Czech Republic. http://fu.ff.cuni.cz/workshop2014/ (12/13)
6-8 October 2014. 11th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR-2014). São Carlos, Brazil. http://nilc.icmc.usp.br/propor2014/ (11/13)
## 9-10 October 2014. Ferrara International Phonology Meeting. Ferrara, Italy. https://sites.google.com/a/unife.it/ferrara-international-phonology-meeting/ (07/14)
10-11 October 2014. 1st Symposium on Intonation and Tone in the Spanish-speaking World (InToSpan). University of Massachusetts – Amherst, USA. http://intospan2014.weebly.com (06/14)
17-19 October 2014. 2014 International Conference on Phonetic Research and Language Learning & English Phonetic Conference in China. Changsha, Hunan, China. http://www.icprll2014.org/ (03/14)
30-31 October 2014. Phonetics and Phonology of the Baltic Languages (BaltPhon). Vilnius, Lithuania. http://www.flf.vu.lt/naujienos/renginiai/1131-fonetika (06/14)
## 30-31 October 2014. Empirical Approaches to the Phonological Structure of Words. Marburg Hessen, Germany. http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb09/lingbas/aktuelles/conference (07/14)
12-14 November 2014. The Sounds of Indo-European 3 (SIE3). Opava, Czech Republic. http://sounds-of-indo-european.webnode.cz/ (03/14)
2-4 December 2014. 15th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST). Christchurch, New Zealand. www.nzibb.canterbury.ac.nz/SST.shtml (04/14)
4-5 December 2014. Palatalization. Tromsø, Norway. https://castl.uit.no/index.php/conferences/palatalization-conference (06/14)
8-9 December 2014. Workshop on the Role of Prosody in Language Learning (WAPSTI). Sydney, Australia. http://www.mq.edu.au/wapsti (05/14)
11-13 December 2014. 8th International Conference on Native and Non-native Accents of English (ACCENTS 2014). Łódź, Poland. http://filolog.uni.lodz.pl/accents (04/14)
## 4-6 March 2015. Workshop: Universal Biases on Phonological Acquisition and Processing. Session of Annual Meeting 2015 of DGfS (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft). Leipzig, Germany. https://sites.google.com/site/bollavetisyan/workshop-universal-biases/call (07/14)
## 4-6 March 2015. Workshop: Strong versus Weak Prosodic Positions: possible Variation and Relevance for Grammar. Session of Annual Meeting 2015 of DGfS (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft). Leipzig, Germany. http://conference.uni-leipzig.de/dgfs2015/index.php?id=8&L=1 (07/14)
21-23 May 2015. 4th International Conference on English Pronunciation: Issues & Practices (EPIP4). Prague, Czech Republic. http://fu.ff.cuni.cz/epip4/ (12/13)
10-14 August 2015. 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS). Glasgow, Scotland. http://www.icphs2015.info/ (02/14)
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CONFERENCES
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Leiden Conference on Word Stress and Accent
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden, The Netherlands, 15-17 August 2014
http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucl/stress-and-accent/
From 15 August up to and including 17 August, 2014 LUCL (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics) will host a conference on word stress and accent. The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers and scholars interested in the nature of stress and accent. This workshop is a follow-up conference to the workshops on Stress and Accent in 2010 and 2011 at the University of Connecticut and in 2012 at the University of Delaware. It is supported by grant no. 1123692 from the National Science Foundation and The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
Invited Speakers:
S. L. Anya Lunden (College of William & Mary)
Carlos Gussenhoven (Nijmegen University)
Jeff Heinz (University of Delaware)
Vincent van Heuven (Fryske Academie)
Harry van der Hulst (University of Connecticut)
Larry Hyman (UC Berkeley)
Haruo Kubonozo (National Institute for Japanese Linguistics, Tokyo)
Keren Rice (University of Toronto)
Hisao Tokizaki (Sapporo University)
For information about the program, registration and other relevant information see:
http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucl/stress-and-accent/
Organizers: Rob Goedemans, Jeff Heinz and Harry van der Hulst
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Seventeenth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2014)
Brno, Czech Republic, 8-12 September 2014
http://www.tsdconference.org/
SUBMISSION OF DEMONSTRATION ABSTRACTS
Authors are invited to present actual projects, developed software and hardware or interesting material relevant to the topics of the conference. The authors of the demonstrations should provide the abstract not exceeding one page as plain text. The submission must be made using the online form available at the conference www pages.
The accepted demonstrations will be presented during a special Demonstration Session (see the Demo Instructions at www.tsdconference.org). Demonstrators can present their contribution with their own notebook with an Internet connection provided by the organisers or the organisers can prepare a PC computer with multimedia support for demonstrators.
IMPORTANT DATES
August 3 2014 ............ Submission of demonstration abstracts
August 10 2014 ............ Notification of acceptance for demonstrations sent to the authors
September 3-7 2014 ........ Conference dates
The demonstration abstracts will not appear in the Proceedings of TSD 2014 but they will be published electronically at the conference website.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Ralph Grishman, New York University, USA
Active Learning for Information Extraction
Bernardo Magnini, FBK - Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Entailment graphs for text analytics
Salim Roukos, IBM, USA
Recent Progress in Statistical Machine Translation: Algorithms and Applications
The conference is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen. The conference is supported by International Speech Communication Association.
TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between researchers in both spoken and written language processing from all over the world. Proceedings of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. TSD Proceedings are regularly indexed by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index. Moreover, LNAI series are listed in all major citation databases such as DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC or COMPENDEX.
Topics of the conference will include (but are not limited to):
- Corpora and Language Resources (monolingual, multilingual, text and spoken corpora, large web corpora, disambiguation, specialized lexicons, dictionaries)
- Speech Recognition (multilingual, continuous, emotional speech, handicapped speaker, out-of-vocabulary words, alternative way of feature extraction, new models for acoustic and language modelling)
- Tagging, Classification and Parsing of Text and Speech (morphological and syntactic analysis, synthesis and disambiguation, multilingual processing, sentiment analysis, credibility analysis, automatic text labeling, summarization, authorship attribution)
- Speech and Spoken Language Generation (multilingual, high fidelity speech synthesis, computer singing)
- Semantic Processing of Text and Speech (information extraction, information retrieval, data mining, semantic web, knowledge representation, inference, ontologies, sense disambiguation, plagiarism detection)
- Integrating Applications of Text and Speech Processing (machine translation, natural language understanding, question-answering strategies, assistive technologies)
- Automatic Dialogue Systems (self-learning, multilingual, question-answering systems, dialogue strategies, prosody in dialogues)
- Multimodal Techniques and Modelling (video processing, facial animation, visual speech synthesis, user modelling, emotions and personality modelling)
Papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly encouraged.
FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE
The conference program will include presentation of invited papers, oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will be presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions.
Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow for additional informal interactions.
The official language of the conference is English.
All correspondence regarding the conference should be
addressed to
Ales Horak, TSD 2014
Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
phone: +420-5-49 49 18 63
fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20
email: [log in to unmask]
The official TSD 2014 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/
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Bias in Speech Perception
Special session of Bias in Auditory Perception
Aarhus, Denmark, 19 September 2014
http://interactingminds.au.dk/events/single-events/artikel/bias-in-auditory-perception
This session is devoted to studies on the occurrence of bias in speech perception, its neurolinguistic correlates, and the factors that correlate with perceptual bias.
Recent research showed that speech perception can be influenced by social categorization. Perceived age, gender, the overall dialect or ethnolect, the sexual orientation, and the ethnic background of the speaker are among the factors that may lead to certain expectations regarding the pronunciation. Subsequently, these expectations can easily lead to misjudgements regarding accuracy of speech in e.g. speech therapy or second language acquisition. These expectations may also lead to misidentification of speech segments among naïve speakers as well as professional linguists. This potentially affects speech transcriptions in dialectology and sociolinguistics and phonological descriptions in fieldwork and anthropological linguistics.
Keynote Speakers:
Ocke Bohn (Aarhus University) on bias in second language phonetics.
Katie Drager (University of Hawaii) on perceptual bias in sociolinguistics
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Phonology 2014 – Annual Meeting on Phonology
Cambridge, MA, USA, 19-21 September 2014
Phonology 2014 will be held at MIT from September 19-21, 2014. Methods tutorials will be held on Friday Sept 19, and research presentations (talks and posters) will take place on Sat and Sun Sept 20-21. This is the second installment of the Annual Meeting on Phonology, a series of general phonology conferences inaugurated in Fall 2013 at UMass Amherst.
Invited Speakers:
Naomi Feldman, University of Maryland
Gillian Gallagher, NYU
René Kager, Utrecht University
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Ferrara International Phonology Meeting
Ferrara, Italy, 9-10 October 2014
https://sites.google.com/a/unife.it/ferrara-international-phonology-meeting/
The first International Phonology Meeting, to be held in Ferrara on 9-10 October 2014, intends to give to scholars concerned with generative linguistics an opportunity for discussion, on such research areas as the place of phonology in the grammar and the primes and nature of phonological representations. The meetings aim is to point out questions that are empirically and theoretically crucial for research in phonology in the mid and long term.
Invited Speakers:
Andrea Calabrese
Mirko Grimaldi
John Harris
Rita Manzini
Giovanna Marotta
Marc van Oostendorp
Leonardo Savoia
Tobias Scheer
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Empirical Approaches to the Phonological Structure of Words
Marburg Hessen, Germany, 30-31 October 2014
http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb09/lingbas/aktuelles/conference
Understanding language requires investigating its fundamental categories. One of the basic grammatical categories in linguistics is the phonological word. Due to its multidimensionality, it relates to semantics, morphology, phonology and syntax. The phonological word is nevertheless a category that has only been an object of serious study since the prosodic turn in phonology and thus cannot be considered an established category of grammatical description. The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars interested in the complex relations of the phonological word, applying different empirical approaches and thereby to encourage communication and discussion about methodologies that can be used for the empirical study of the 'phonological word'.
Invited Speakers:
Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (University of Potsdam)
Adamantios Gafos (University of Potsdam)
Mathias Scharinger (MPI Frankfurt)
Renata Szczepaniak (University of Hamburg)
No conference fee is required. We will organise a location for a conference dinner and participants will pay for their dinner.
A selection of papers will be published.
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Workshop: Universal Biases on Phonological Acquisition and Processing
Session of Annual Meeting 2015 of DGfS (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft)
Leipzig, Germany, 4-6 March 2015
https://sites.google.com/site/bollavetisyan/workshop-universal-biases/call
Typological research indicates that many languages share specific patterns regarding their phoneme inventories, syllable structures, phonotactics and prosodic systems. A recurrent topic in acquisition research is the question of whether typologically well-attested patterns reflect universal biases on phonological acquisition and/or speech processing. This workshop aims at discussing the nature of these biases and to what extent they influence phonological acquisition and processing of L1 and L2 in children and adults.
There seems to be a strong consensus among researchers that phonological acquisition is guided by universal biases. Yet, the specific nature of these biases is unclear: are they functional or analytical, domain-general or domain-specific? What is it that makes some patterns, often called natural patterns, more easily accessible and learnable than others: Are they are innate or are they triggered by experience with language? In addition, it is debated whether there are time limits on the operating periods of biases (possibly reflecting difficulties in L2 phonological acquisition, i.e., a critical period), or whether they also influence L2 phonological acquisition. If they influence the L2, what happens when the L1 phonological system is in conflict with the L2? In addition, the question arises to what extent universal biases might be at work even during speech processing after acquisition is completed. These classical questions have recently received new attention and benefit from the revival of artificial language paradigms, which enable us to investigate language acquisition and processing likewise.
The goal of the workshop is to discuss effects of biases on L1 and early L2 phonological acquisition and their relation to age of acquisition from theoretical and empirical perspective. We aim to contribute to the current debate by assembling new insights to get a more concrete comprehension of the nature of universal biases.
Keynote speakers:
To be announced
Call for Papers:
We invite contributions investigating effects of biases on phonological acquisition and processing of segmental and suprasegmental structures in natural and artificial languages in monolingual and bilingual (L2) infants, children and adults. Contributions that may build a bridge between empirical findings and linguistic theory are particularly welcome.
Abstract Submission Guidelines:
Abstracts should be submitted for 30-minute presentations (including discussion). Format: 1 page (TimesNewRoman, 12pt, 1 inch margins, including references and figures etc.). Please submit two pdf files containing your abstract via email (to: [log in to unmask]): one file should include name(s) of author(s), affiliation(s), email address(es), title of talk; another one should be anonymous. Abstracts and presentations must be in English. Your name should occur in the file name.
Important Dates:
Abstract deadline: 15 August 2014
Notification of abstract acceptance: Mid September 2014
Conference dates: 4-6 March 2015
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Workshop: Strong versus Weak Prosodic Positions: possible Variation and Relevance for Grammar
Session of Annual Meeting 2015 of DGfS (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft)
Leipzig, Germany, 4-6 March 2015
http://conference.uni-leipzig.de/dgfs2015/index.php?id=8&L=1
The workshop is part of the 37th annual conference of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS) which will take place at the University of Leipzig from March 4-6, 2015.
Workshop Convenors: Renate Raffelsiefen (IDS Mannheim/FU Berlin) & Marzena Żygis (ZAS Berlin/HU Berlin)
Both phoneticians and phonologists have found reason to distinguish 'strong' and 'weak' positions referring to constituents of the prosodic hierarchy, including higher constituents, whose boundaries align with morphosyntactic boundaries, as well as lower constituents such as foot and syllable. Strength is commonly associated with initial positions and with stress whereas weakness is associated with non-prominent positions. Reference to strong versus weak positions has been invoked in articulatory phonetics (target overshoot, i.e. enhancement of the duration and/or magnitude of articulatory gestures, in strong positions versus target undershoot in weak position) as well as auditory phonetics (lower rate of misperception in strong positions versus higher rate in weak position). It has also been invoked to account for potential contrast, more distinctiveness being associated with strong positions (cf. the notions of 'positional faithfulness' and 'positional markedness' in Optimality Theory). Although reference to 'strong' versus 'weak' positions appears to be universally grounded in prominence and although it seems to be taken for granted that positions considered strong for the purpose of one area of phonetics or phonology implies strength for the purpose of others there is evidence for disparity. For instance, the word-initial position is associated with strong potential contrast by Beckman (1998), whereas Trubezkoy links both margin positions of words to low contrastiveness (e.g. neutralization of the voicing contrast for all consonants in word-initial position in Erza-Mordwin, Trubetzkoy 1958: 212ff). Similarly, the word-initial position is associated with target overshoot (e.g. aspiration of voiceless plosives) in English or German, but also exhibits fewer contrasts in fricatives than for instance the foot-internal position. The latter nonetheless exhibits target undershoot (flapping in American English).
Invited Speakers:
Rachel Walker, University of Southern California, USA
Yi Xu, University College London, UK
Call for Papers:
In view of these discrepancies, the workshop will provide a forum for phonologists and phoneticians to discuss associations between segmental phenomena and prosodic positions from a cross-linguistic point of view, focusing on questions like:
- Which prosodic positions need to be distinguished in terms of weakness versus strength to account for what sort of phenomenon (enhancement of articulatory gestures, perceptual discriminability, potential contrast).
- To what extent do these phenomena overlap?
- Is there evidence that weak versus strong positions could be language-specific?
- What are the implications for the modeling of grammar, e.g. is there a need to distinguish a phonemic level (contrast) from phonetics, the latter modeled as implementation?
We invite papers focusing on the phenomena listed above as well as related issues.
Please submit anonymous abstracts of max. 400 words excluding references (preferably as txt or tex files) via Easy Chair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ag1
Important Dates:
Paper notification: September 8, 2014
Camera ready abstracts: November 15, 2014
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POSITIONS VACANT
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Postdoctoral position in speech perception and production
Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/linguistics/
Deadline: 1 September 2014 or until position is filled
Applications are invited for a postdoctoral position in phonetics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. The initial appointment is for one year, with the possibility of renewal for a second year. The position is funded by an NSF grant to Patrice Beddor and Andries Coetzee to study the time course of speech production and perception. A Ph.D. in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Speech and Hearing Sciences, or allied discipline is required; also required is expertise in laboratory techniques in speech production and perception. Experience with eye tracking, ultrasound, and/or aerodynamic instrumentation, and interests in statistical modeling, would be particularly useful.
The project focuses on the dynamics of perception of coarticulation in relation to the dynamics of production of coarticulation for the individual language user. The successful candidate will be involved in all aspects of the project. Primary duties include working with the PIs to plan, conduct, and write up the experiments associated with the grant. The researcher may also oversee graduate and undergraduate students working on grant-related projects, and will be encouraged to work on their own research as it relates the goals of the grant. The successful candidate will more generally participate in a vibrant research environment that includes faculty and students in Linguistics, Psychology, and the new Weinberg Cognitive Science Institute. Laboratory facilities in the Department of Linguistics include eye tracking, ultrasound, oral/nasal airflow, EGG, EEG, and (soon) electromagnetic articulatory tracking systems.
A cover letter explaining qualifications for the position, a CV, a research statement, and one or more representative publications or other writings should be sent to the email address below. Please also arrange to have three letters of recommendation sent to that address. Review of dossiers will begin on September 1, 2014. The (flexible) start date of the postdoctoral position is January 1, 2015.
Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. The University of Michigan is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.
Application deadline: September 1, 2014 or until position is filled.
Contact name: Patrice Beddor
Contact email: beddor AT umich.edu
Application email: Michigan-Linguistics AT umich.edu
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Assistant Professor, Phonology
Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University
British Columbia, Canada
http://www.sfu.ca/linguistics.html
Application deadline: 31 October 2014
The Department of Linguistics at SFU will have one or more openings at the rank of assistant professor (tenure track), beginning September 1, 2015. Applications are invited from candidates with expertise in the core area of phonology; specialization in any of the areas of articulatory phonology, laboratory phonology, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, or language documentation would be an asset. A completed Ph. D. by the time of appointment is a primary qualification for appointment, as is demonstrated promise as both a teacher and researcher. Duties of the position will include undergraduate and graduate teaching, development of a strong research program, and participation in the collegial governance of the department and university.
Linguistics at SFU (web page above) offers both graduate and undergraduate degree programs, joint majors with Computing Science and First Nations Studies, a TESL certificate program, a speech science certificate, a certificate in First Nations language proficiency, and provides one of the principal components of the Cognitive Science undergraduate degree program. The department currently serves 250 undergraduate majors and 25 graduate students. In addition to a full suite of linguistics courses at all levels, the department offers an array of courses in First Nations languages, primarily in communities throughout B. C. and the Yukon. The department’s research infrastructure includes a phonetics lab, language and brain lab, phonological processing lab, experimental syntax lab, and a Centre for First Nations Languages.
An application with a covering letter, the names of three references, and a current curriculum vitae should be submitted by the deadline.
All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority. Simon Fraser University is committed to employment equity, welcomes diversity in the workplace, and encourages applications from all qualified individuals including all genders, members of visible minorities, aboriginal persons, and persons with disabilities. These positions are subject to budget approval.
Under the authority of the University Act, personal information that is required by the University for academic appointment competitions will be collected. For further details see the collection notice: http://www.sfu.ca/vpacademic/faculty_openings/collection_notice.html#main_content_title
Contact name: Chair’s Secretary
Contact email: perry AT sfu.ca
Application address:
Faculty Search
Department of Linguistics
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive
Burnaby V5A 1S6
Canada
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Language Engineer
Nuance Communications, Research and Development
Ghent, Belgium
http://www.nuance.com
Application deadline: Open until filled
To strengthen our Research and Development team in Merelbeke, near Ghent, Belgium, we are looking for a linguist with strong project management skills and experience in quality assurance. The ideal candidate has a background in text-to-speech (TTS) and has worked on commercial speech products. Strong methodological skills and an interest in process design are a must. You will learn about the latest innovations in spoken language technology and oversee the quality of language and voice data releases for Nuance’s flagship text-to-speech system, Vocalizer. The technology you will work on is deployed in the majority of cars and speech-enabled mobile devices on the market today, and is used by global enterprises and healthcare providers. We offer a dynamic, international work environment with rapid growth and a global reach.
Key responsibilities:
- Analysis, monitoring, and improvement of release processes for the Vocalizer TTS product line
- Design of tools and metrics to track progress in pronunciation accuracy and perceptual quality
- Development of linguistic components for various languages and tasks, including text normalization, morphological analysis, syntactic analysis, and prosody prediction
- Adoption of data-driven techniques and NLU approaches to refine or replace rule-based approaches
- Improvement of processes for testing and evaluation of linguistic components
- Responding to reported issues reported from deployed systems, analyzing, fixing and releasing
- Managing improvement and customization projects of various scope and team sizes
- Number of Years of Work Experience: At least five years of professional experience are required
Required Skills:
- The successful candidate is a team player and a fast learner with an analytical mindset and a pragmatic approach to problem solving
- Project management
- Quality assurance
- Process design
- Computational linguistics
- Phonetics
- Ability to work in distributed teams
- High proficiency in written and spoken English
Preferred Skills:
- Mathematical background and understanding of statistical learning techniques
- Experience with automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language understanding (NLU), and Machine Learning
- Experience with version control systems (e.g. hg, svn)
- Scripting and programming skills in Python, Perl, or an equivalent programming language
- Native proficiency in a non-European language
Education:
- MSc in linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science, or equivalent
We offer a competitive compensation package and a casual yet technically challenging work environment. Join our dynamic, entrepreneurial team and become part of our fast growing track of continuing success. Nuance is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
If you are interested in joining our team, please send your English CV including earliest starting date and salary expectations via our career home page (below) or via the application email below, reference 1-11121.
Contact name: Craig Robertson
Contact and application email: Craig.Robertson AT nuance.com
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IPA STUDENT AWARDS
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The IPA will grant three more IPA Student Awards of €425/£350 in the remaining months of 2014. Applicants for these Awards must be (1) a current student member of the Association at the time of application, and (2) first and presenting author on a paper accepted for an open (non-student, international) conference held in 2014.
To apply for an Award, send the Secretary of the IPA (Patricia Keating, keating AT humnet.ucla.edu) an email with your name and current academic affiliation, the name and email address of a current academic supervisor, the name, date, and location of the conference, a copy of your paper or abstract that has been accepted, some form of confirmation of acceptance of your paper, and a brief (1-2 sentences) description of the phonetic relevance of your paper. Optionally, you may also describe the phonetic relevance of your attendance at the conference.
Please submit your application at least 2 weeks before the conference.
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NEW SERIES
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Equinox Publishing
Studies in Phonetics and Phonology
A Book Series, Edited by
Professor Martin J. Ball (Linköping University, Sweden)
Professor Pascal van Lieshout (University of Toronto, Canada)
The aim of this series is to provide both accessible and relevant texts to students of linguistics, phonetics and speech sciences, and to publish more advanced texts and edited collections. The textbooks aim to cover a wide variety of topics relevant for such an audience, and to introduce these topics in a practical way to enable students to undertake a range of analysis procedures. The more advanced books will present state-of-the-art research in the topic concerned.
While we intend to cover a wide range of topics in phonetics and phonology, there will be an emphasis on phonetic studies of under-reported languages, or the bringing of new data to explore phonetic characteristics on the one hand, and on phonological studies that employ more psycholinguistic, cognitive, and functional approaches on the other (and, of course, on the interaction between phonetics and phonology). The recent increase in interest in laboratory phonology we see as particularly to be welcomed. Each volume will be authored by leading authorities in the field, who have a grasp of both the theoretical issues and the practical requirements of the area and, further, are at the forefront of current research and practice.
This series, then, will act as a bridge between scientific developments in the study of speech, and the application of these to data analysis. It is hoped that the texts will stimulate the reader’s interest in the topic to promote well-informed and competent students, researchers and instructors.
For details on how to draw up proposals, please contact one of the Editors:
martin.j.ball AT liu.se
p.vanlieshout AT utoronto.ca
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The deadline for material for the next foNETiks newsletter is 4 August 2014.
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Dr Lisa Lim
Coordinator, Language and Communication Programme,
Chair, Departmental Research Postgraduate Committee,
School of English, The University of Hong Kong
http://www.english.hku.hk/staff/lisalim.htm, http://hku-hk.academia.edu/LisaLim
Interviewed for the School of English's Alumni webpage:
http://www.english.hku.hk/alumni/10636/research-and-teaching-staff-of-the-school-a-presentation-of-dr-lisa-lim/
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