When and where: University of Alberta, Edmonton, February 13-14, 2010. Robert Kirchner and Anne-Michelle Tessier, organizers
Theme: Major advances have been made in recent years towards explicit modelling of phonological acquisition, including increasingly sophisticated OT learning algorithms, as well as application of general machine learning techniques (e.g. expectation maximization and maximum entropy learning). At the same time, evidence of token and type frequency sensitivity in the propagation of both categorical and gradient patterns in speech has spurred growing interest in exemplar-based models of acquisition and processing. This workshop aims to bring together these two strands of research, promoting dialogue between those pursuing symbolic and subsymbolic approaches to acquisition of the sound patterns of spoken language. We invite oral and poster presentations from phonologists, phoneticians, psycholinguists, computational linguists, and speech scientists on this general theme. Though relevant analytic, programmatic, or experimental presentations are also welcome, priority will be given to abstracts reflecting original computational modelling results for some aspect of phonological/phonetic acquisition.
Invited speakers will include: Adam Albright (MIT), Michael Becker (Harvard), Andries Coetzee (Michigan), Robert Daland (UCLA), Bruce Hayes (UCLA), Jeff Mielke (Ottawa), Ben Munson (Minnesota), James Myers (CCU, Taiwan), Janet Pierrehumbert (Northwestern), Alan Yu (Chicago). Titles to be announced.
Funding: The organizers anticipate sufficient funding to cover travel and accommodation costs of all presenters whose abstracts are accepted, above and beyond the invited speakers.
Submission: Abstracts for oral or poster presentations should be no longer than one page (US letter or A4, 11 pt, 1 inch margins) with a second page for references, data and/or figures. Abstracts should be emailed as a PDF attachment to
phonmod@ualberta.ca, deadline: midnight (Mountain Time), November 20, 2009.
Unless the submitter indicates otherwise, the organizers will consider each abstract’s suitability for oral or poster presentation. Authors should include the title, name(s), and affiliation(s) in the body of the email.