35.525, Calls: Variance and Invariance in Phonological Representation: Insights from Articulation (LabPhon 19 satellite workshop)

Thu Feb 15 15:05:02 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-525. Thu Feb 15 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.525, Calls: Variance and Invariance in Phonological Representation: Insights from Articulation (LabPhon 19 satellite workshop)

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Date: 14-Feb-2024
From: Sam Kirkham [s.kirkham at lancaster.ac.uk]
Subject: Variance and Invariance in Phonological Representation: Insights from Articulation (LabPhon 19 satellite workshop)

Full Title: Variance and invariance in phonological representation:
Insights from articulation (LabPhon 19 satellite workshop)

Date: 26-Jun-2024 - 26-Jun-2024
Location: Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea, South
Contact Person: Sam Kirkham
Meeting Email: s.kirkham at lancaster.ac.uk
Web Site: https://labphon.org/labphon19/variance-and-invariance

Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics; Phonology
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 29-Mar-2024

Meeting Description:

A central concern in laboratory phonology is the architecture of the
phonological grammar and its relationship with physically-observable
events. At the heart of this lies a fundamental question: what are the
invariant physical correlates of abstract phonological categories? The
invention of the sound spectrograph in the 1940s was instrumental in
the search for invariant relationships between physical parameters and
phonological categories. This search later spanned articulation
(Liberman & Mattingly, 1985) and perception (Fowler & Smith, 1986),
but evidence for invariant signatures remained partial (Lisker, 1985)
and sometimes controversial (Fowler, 1996; Ohala, 1996).

In the intervening decades, research on speech articulation has posed
a number of hypotheses concerning the relationship between variable
phonetics and invariant phonological structure. Dynamical theories of
phonological cognition situate invariance in abstract spatiotemporal
representations, with contrast specified by relationships between
parameters (Browman & Goldstein, 1992; Iskarous, 2017). Such
invariance is likely to be fundamentally dynamic in nature, residing
in structural relations between phonetic variation and phonological
categories across a parameter range (Shaw, Gafos, Hoole et al., 2011).
Despite these advances, however, fundamental questions remain, such
as:

1. How do phonological categories emerge? Theories such as
Articulatory Phonology/Task Dynamics locate invariance at the level of
gestural parameters (Saltzman & Munhall, 1989; Browman & Goldstein,
1992), but how do such categorical distinctions emerge in the first
place? Are phonological categories emergent from the inherent dynamics
of the gestural system, with a bifurcation at critical parameter
values (Iskarous, Steffman & Cole, 2023), or are such categories a
matter of parameter specification from a continuous range of values?

2. How do phonological representations change? Sound change is widely
hypothesised to stem from a range of sources, including
phonologisation of coarticulatory, biomechanical and perceptual biases
on speech production (Ohala, 1981; Harrington, Kleber & Reubold,
2011). A change in phonological representation necessarily involves a
change in articulatory planning, but how is variance and invariance in
planning representations – from the individual speaker to the speech
community – conceptualised by different frameworks? Dynamical
approaches have increasingly looked to dynamic neural fields to
capture changes in representations (Kirov & Gafos, 2007; Roon & Gafos,
2016; Tilsen, 2019; Shaw & Tang, 2023), while symbolic models locate
such changes in the phonetic implementation process (Turk &
Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2020). What are the implications of these different
approaches for our understanding of phonological invariance and sound
change?

3. What is the relationship between the articulatory correlates of
phonological categories and the corresponding acoustic/perceptual
units? While the dynamics and kinematics of articulation are
fundamental to speech planning and phonological representation,
successful speech communication is necessarily premised upon a
relationship between articulation, acoustics and perception. To this
end, what is the role of quantal acoustic-articulatory relations in
the emergence and specification of invariant relationships between
phonetics and phonology? (Stevens, 1989). How should we interpret
articulatory evidence for phonological structure in the absence of
corresponding acoustic evidence? And to what extent are listeners
sensitive to dominant and/or gradient articulatory modes of contrast?
(Iskarous, Nam & Whalen, 2010).

It is clear that articulatory-based phonological frameworks are
central to our understanding of phonological structure and phonetic
variation. At the same time, different frameworks disagree profoundly
on the nature of phonological representations, so what kinds of
evidence would allow us to distinguish such accounts?

Call for Papers:

We invite oral presentations for this satellite workshop on the role
of articulation in phonological representation, in phonetic variation,
and in the architecture of the grammar. This topic necessitates
multi-dimensional approaches and we therefore encourage submissions
across different frameworks and using diverse methods, including
speech production (e.g. EMA, ultrasound, MRI, aerodynamics),
articulatory (socio)phonetics, computational modelling, and
theoretical research. We particularly welcome submissions that align
with the following topics:

- Articulatory variation in the context of phonological representation
- Phonologically-informed theories that explicitly model articulatory
variation, such as Articulatory Phonology/Task Dynamics, XT/3C, DIVA,
etc.
- Computational modelling of articulatory phonological representations
- The role of articulation in sound change
- Articulation at the interface between phonetics and phonology
- Acoustic-articulatory relations

Submission information

Please submit a one-page abstract (11pt font), plus one extra page for
figures and references, to s.kirkham at lancaster.ac.uk by Friday 29
March 2024 (by the end of the day, Anywhere on Earth time).

We anticipate that we will allocate 20-30 minute slots to each
presentation, but this may be adjusted depending on the quantity and
nature of submissions. We will notify authors of the finalised format
upon acceptance.

Workshop information

Date/Time: 09:00-12:30, Wednesday 26 June 2024
Location: TBA (but the same place as the conference venue, HIT,
Hanyang University)

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