[Lingtyp] Call for papers SUW23: Speech Units Workshop (Zurich, April 17-19th 2023)

[Borja Herce]

Dear colleagues,

Please allow me to circulate the call for papers for our upcoming workshop
on speech units in under-documented languages. Link and topic descriptions
below.

Best,

Borja Herce



*https://sites.google.com/view/speechunitsworkshop/home?authuser=0
<https://sites.google.com/view/speechunitsworkshop/home?authuser=0>*


*Topic description:*

Language endangerment is a topic of concern and the interest in language
documentation has grown (Himmelmann 1998, 2006; Thieberger 2020). With the
technological advent, language documentation has extended to include more
speech data. However, the number of instrumental studies dealing with the
acoustic characteristics of under-documented languages remains relatively
small. This workshop offers a forum for the discussion of the experimental
study of Speech Units and aims at providing training for those interested
in engaging with the topic.

Instrumental studies in intonational phonology have shown that languages
vary in how they phonetically encode units of different sizes, such as the
prosodic word, the accentual phrase, or the intermediate phrase (Jun 2006,
Jun 2014). Despite great advances contributing new insights into the field
of prosodic typology, studies dealing quantitively with more diverse
languages remain under-represented. There is a need for more data and
studies from more diverse languages to better understand typological
variability and e.g., why some languages mark units on metrically strong
heads, while others prioritise edges of larger units and whether this has
an impact on language segmentation processes or first language acquisition.

>From an acquisition perspective, studies on several Western-European
languages have shown that children can package and process their input into
larger units such as clauses at around 6 months of age (Nazzi et al. 2000
for English, Schmitz et al 2003 for German, Johnson & Seidl 2008 for
Dutch). Later, children are able to segment the speech stream into smaller
speech units such as words, using the salience of utterance edges (Seidl &
Johnson 2006) and the rhythm, i.e., syllable vs foot, and phonotactic
properties, such as vowel harmony (Nihan Ketrez 2014), of their target
language. This order of segmentation from larger clauses to smaller units,
and the types of cues identified remain to be investigated in more
typologically diverse languages.

The *whole-word phonology approach *(Vihman & Croft 2007) is an emergentist
approach to early phonological development, according to which children do
not first learn the individual elements composing words, such as morphemes
or affixes etc., but instead start by trying to produce whole words. To
date, most studies were carried out on speech production of European
languages (but see Khattab and Al-Tamimi 2013 for Arabic, and Ota 2013 for
Japanese), and data is still lacking on other languages.



*Call for papers:*

This workshop invites contributions for 30-minute presentations (20+10)
dealing with the speech production and structure of word, word-like, and
intonational units in child and adult speech from diverse languages and
language varieties. Contributions discussing aspects in relation to bi- or
multilingual speakers are also encouraged, as are studies dealing with
experimental data collection and corpus-based investigations.

*Extended submission d**eadline:* 1st December 2022

*Date of notification:* 23rd December 2022
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