36.3900, Summer Schools: Speech Matters - 2nd Edition (Italy)

Thu Dec 18 17:05:02 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3900. Thu Dec 18 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3900, Summer Schools: Speech Matters - 2nd Edition (Italy)

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Date: 18-Dec-2025
From: Alessandra Barotto [alessandra.barotto at uninsubria.it]
Subject: Speech Matters - 2nd Edition

Speech Matters - 2nd Edition

Host Institution: Lake Como School of Advanced Studies
Website: https://spma.lakecomoschool.org/

Dates: 19-May-2026 - 22-May-2026
Location: Como, Lombardia, Italy

Minimum Education Level: MA
Special Qualifications: The school will be of interest to PhD
candidates and Postdocs working in various fields having to do with
spoken language.

Focus: Spoken language, multimodality and information management,
conversation in multilingual settings, language ecology and
documentation, LLMs applied to task-oriented dialogues
Description:
This School is the second edition of Speech matters, which was
successfully held at Villa del Grumello in May 2022, attracting around
forty participants from a variety of international backgrounds.
Building on the positive experience and feedback of the first edition,
this new edition aims to further strengthen the dialogue between
sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, linguistic typology,
language documentation, and corpus-based approaches by exploring how
recent methodological advances can foster greater integration across
these fields.
The first edition of the School was grounded in the idea that spoken
language offers an essential vantage point for rethinking current
models of ‘standard’ grammar. Such models have often paid limited
attention to spoken data, aside from occasional acknowledgments that
specific patterns may diverge from those found in written or
standardized language. This neglect of the spoken modality reflects
more the historical assumptions about what a grammarian should study
than any inherent limitation of grammatical models themselves in
accounting for speech and extended discourse. As a result, insights
from research on spoken language – across fields like
sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics, and discourse analysis –
are seldom incorporated into broader models of human communication,
despite their potential to reshape our understanding of grammar. These
insights are also relevant for speech technologies, whose
effectiveness depends heavily on access to realistic, task-specific
training data and on accurate modeling of spoken interaction.
Indeed, in speech, not all linguistic choices are equally probable.
Speakers tend to select structures and patterns that are well-suited
to the spoken modality, whether due to cognitive efficiency or social
appropriateness. This gives rise to cross-linguistically recurrent
features that can be described as modality-specific constraints –
i.e., features that consistently appear in spoken texts across
different languages. These are not simply a consequence of the
vocal-auditory channel but rather emerge from the complex semiotic and
communicative conditions in which spoken discourse typically unfolds.
They often involve linguistic or discourse features with a high yield
factor, that is, elements optimized to support both the production and
comprehension of speech.
The School aims to bring together scholars working on spoken language
from diverse perspectives, with the goal of fostering dialogue among
disciplines such as linguistic typology, sociolinguistics, discourse
analysis, prosodic analysis, and natural language processing. The
novelty of this initiative lies precisely in its commitment to
promoting meaningful cross-fertilization among fields that share
spoken language as their primary object of study, but that often rely
on distinct methodologies and pursue different research aims.
The school will comprise five courses and one lab:
Course 1: Layers of cooperation: The interactional architecture of
spoken language (Prof. Caterina Mauri – Alma Mater Studiorum,
Università di Bologna)
Course 2: Multimodal and dynamic information management in natural
interaction (Prof. Pavel Ozerov – Universität Innsbruck)
Course 3: Language contact in speech (Prof. Yaron Matras, Aston
Institute for Forensic Linguistics)
Course 4: Integrating Linguistic Fieldwork, the Ecology of Language,
and Ecolinguistics: The Case of AlUla (KSA) (Prof. Stefano Manfredi,
CNRS, SeDyL, Paris)
Course 5: Modeling Collaborative Behaviors in Task-oriented Dialogues
with Large Language Models (Prof. Bernardo Magnini, Fondazione Bruno
Kessler – Trento)
Lab: Hands-on Speech Corpus Processing: Standardization, Automation,
and GitOps for Reproducibility (Dr. Ludovica Pannitto, Alma Mater
Studiorum, Università di Bologna)
Tuition: 180 EURO
Tuition Explanation: Tuition fee covers all lectures, course
materials, Wi-Fi connection, lunches & coffee breaks.
Tuition fee does not cover accommodation and travel.

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Discourse Analysis
                     Language Documentation
                     Pragmatics
                     Sociolinguistics

Registration: 02-Mar-2026 to 16-Mar-2026

Contact Person: Alessandra Barotto
                Email: alessandra.barotto at uninsubria.it

Apply on the web: https://spma.lakecomoschool.org/application/

Registration Instructions:
Deadlines:
Application submission: February 16th, 2026
Notification of acceptance: March 2nd, 2026
Registration and payment: March 16th, 2026
Prospective participants have to fill out and submit the form below,
and upload a 1-page letter (PDF) organized as follows:
- name, department/university, current position (PhD student, postdoc,
other)
- educational background
- research activity and interests
- motivations for participating in the school
Please note that any page after the first one will be automatically
deleted.

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