Workshop on Sociophonetic Methodology for the 2011 Linguistics Institute

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

Thanks to the burgeoning of free or low cost technical resources for acoustic analysis, a much larger, more diverse group of researchers can now conduct detailed phonetic analysis for a variety of linguistic studies; however, the speed with which these resources are being made available makes it difficult for most researchers to keep abreast of the best use of the new technology. This Workshop addresses these methodological needs by providing specialized training for advanced graduate students and professors in the fields of sociolinguistics, field phonetics, corpus linguistics, laboratory/experimental phonology, language documentation and preservation, language acquisition, and social interaction. The venue for the Workshop is the Linguistic Society of America 2011 Summer Institute, devised to permit students and faculty from a cross-section of all subfields to interact and learn from each other. While the Workshop supplements the organizers' Sociophonetics Institute course, everyone at the Institute will be invited to participate in the Workshop. The Workshop presenters, 17 top researchers in specific subspecialties, will each teach the methodological techniques developed for their own research and then moderate a discussion session on the specific techniques. Each of the presenters has been chosen because of his/her accessibility and dynamic teaching and research reputation. The presenters will meet with students and other researchers the week of the Workshop during office hours and casual events, permitting all participants to incubate new research projects together. The presentation materials will serve as the basis for a Workshop website. The high quality of presenters and the planned level of interaction speaks to the intellectual merit of the proposal. The broader impact of this proposal will go to the research community, both students and faculty, who can take advantage of the Workshop to enhance the methodology of the work in their own subfields and to become more reflective about their research methodology.