The Ninth Conference on Laboratory Phonology

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will host the 9th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 9) on June 24-26, 2004. The main goal of this international conference is to promote interdisciplinary research on the sound structure of languages, overcoming the traditional boundaries that separate phonology, as a branch of theoretical linguistics, from the study of speech production, speech perception, spoken language acquisition, and other disciplines concerned with human speech from different perspectives. The central theme of LabPhon 9 will be Change in Phonology. In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, we include subthemes on change in child phonology acquisition, social factors that condition phonetic variation, mechanisms of sound change, phonological change in bilinguals and language learners, and phonological models of variation in computer speech processing. These topics address many important areas of broad social interest, including child language development, language pedagogy, and technologies for human-computer interaction. The LabPhon conference is a major forum for interdisciplinary interaction between linguists and scholars in other fields. Invited speakers and other conference participants are affiliated with diverse academic departments, such as Psychology, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Speech and Hearing Sciences, among others, as well as departments of Linguistics and foreign languages. The conference will support the participation of students and scholars from underrepresented minorities, including African-Americans and Latinos. Selected papers from the conference will be published in an edited volume, the 9th in the influential LabPhon series.