The 4th summer school on 'Speech Production and Perception: Speaker-Specific Behavior”

will be hold in Aix-en-Provence from 30.9.2013 to 4.10.2013.

Speakers show phonetic differences while producing the very same utterance. These speaker-specific differences occur at various linguistic levels and they can be realized phonetically by many parameters such as voice quality, speech rate, loudness, fundamental frequency, breathing, articulatory behavior, etc. At the same time, listeners can vary in the way they exploit such cues for the purpose of speech perception and understanding.

Speaker-specific behavior has long been regarded irrelevant for linguistic theories and is generally treated as noise in the data. Methodologically, speaker-specific variation has often been ignored in the statistical modelling of speech production and perception data.

However, there are numerous recent studies showing that speaker-specific variation allows for new insights into learning processes, speech planning and speech motor control strategies, processing of linguistic and paralinguistic information, among others. We seek to link findings from different disciplines by asking the following questions: 

• Which speaker-specific behaviors are crucial for a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying speech production and perception and which are less important? What can it tell us? Why?

• Does information about the speaker help listeners to extract meaning?

• Do physical and cognitive differences among individuals matter for native language acquisition?

• How do we deal with speaker-specific behavior statistically?

The invited international scholars have been chosen to address these issues.

This summer school is mainly intended for graduate students, post-docs or researchers who work in the field of speech production, perception and perception-production interaction. We expect about 50 participants. One of the aims of the summer school is to provide a forum for exchanges between students, junior and senior researchers and encourage all participants to contribute to the dialog. Please send a letter of motivation and an abstract (no longer than 1 page) of your prospective contribution till to the 15^th of May 2013.

http://summerschool13.sciencesconf.org/

Confirmed invited speakers:

• Alejandrina Cristia (MPI, Nijmegen): Speech acquisition

• Rodger Mundry (MPI, Leipzig): Statistics

• Pascal Perrier (GIPSA-lab, Grenoble): Biomechanics

• Benjamin Swets (Grand Valley State University, Allendale): Psycholinguistics

• Melanie Weirich (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena): Articulation 

• Rachel Smith (University of Glasgow): Speech perception and fine phonetic detail

Organizing committee (in alphabetical order)

Susanne Fuchs (ZAS Berlin, Germany)

Caroline Magister (ZAS Berlin, Germany)

Daniel Pape (IEETA + UA Aveiro, Portugal)

Caterina Petrone (LPL-CNRS Aix-en-Provence, France)