Phonology Thematic Issue 2009

Call for Papers – Relations between phonological models and experimental data (.pdf)

Over the past decades, experimental data have been used increasingly as evidence in phonological theorising. The success of the LabPhon conferences and the associated book series is evidence of this. However, most research in laboratory phonology eschews the kinds of formal grammatical models used in theoretical phonology. LabPhon papers tend to be neutral with respect to choice of grammatical model, or explicitly argue against a phonological grammar approach. On the other hand, research in theoretical phonology tends to rely solely on descriptive grammars or fieldwork as its empirical base. This thematic issue aims to build further bridges between theoretical phonology and laboratory phonology.

We welcome any contributions that discuss the relationship between theoretical phonology and experimental data. For the purpose of this thematic issue, we give a broad interpretation to ‘experimental data’, so that it includes data from experiments as diverse as psycholinguistic/processing tasks (word-likeness, phoneme identification, lexical decision, etc.) and acoustic/articulatory experiments, as well as from experiments in which a computational model is tested against human behavioural evidence. We particularly invite contributions which consider the challenges that non-categorical experimental data may pose to phonological models, those which account for gradience in experimental data and those which use experimental data to investigate properties of the grammatical theory.

This thematic issue, which will be edited by Andries Coetzee (University of Michigan), René Kager (University of Utrecht) and Joe Pater (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), is open to all potential contributors, and is projected to appear as one of the first issues of Phonology 26 (2009). The deadline for submissions is 1 March 2008. General information on the submission of manuscripts can be found here. For this issue, submissions should be sent in PDF format to coetzee@umich.edu and ewen@let.leidenuniv.nl. An abstract (no longer than 150 words) should be included either as a text file or in any commonly available word-processing format. Preference will be given to papers which will occupy no more than 25–30 printed pages in the journal. Submissions will be read by at least two reviewers and by the editors of the thematic issue.