1st International Seminar on the Foundations of Speech (SEFOS): Breathing, Pausing, and the Voice.

Website and Contact

www.sefos.dk, sefos@sdu.dk

Theme

SEFOS is dedicated to the physiological patterns, acoustic signals, and communicative functions of breathing, pausing and the voice - in human-human as well as in human-machine interaction. SEFOS aims to bring together researchers from different disciplines, such as phonetics, phonology, psychology, medicine, acoustics, speech technology, and computer linguistics.

Location and Venue

SEFOS will be held from 1st - 3rd December at the University of Southern Denmark, Campus Sønderborg.

Keynote speakers

Plinio Barbosa, Department of Linguistics, Unicamp, Campinas, Brazil.

'Stylistic and cross-linguistic differences in the prosodic organization of breathing, stressing, and pausing'

Jens Edlund, Department of Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.

'Breathing in interaction between humans and between humans, machines and robots'

Donna Erickson, Kanazawa Medical University, Kanazawa, Japan / Haskins Laboratories, USA

'Our voice: A multifaceted finely-tuned instrument for any occasion and culture'

Call for papers

We invite contributions on all the various aspects of breathing, pausing, and the voice. Reflecting the cross-disciplinary nature of these fields of research, we are particularly pleased about submissions from the entire speech sciences and beyond, i.e., for example, medicine, rhetoric, technology, music, and zoology. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• acoustic and physiological analyses of speech breathing

• breathing, pausing, and phonation patterns under different mental, emotional, physical conditions

• pathological/clinical aspects of breathing, pausing, and the voice, including pain.

• personality traits (including attractiveness), speaking styles, and their links to breathing, pausing, and the voice

• breathing, pausing, and/or voice patterns in human-machine-interaction and speech technology in general

• interrelations between breathing, pausing, and the voice

• interrelations with other features of prosody, such as F0 and intensity

• silent, fluent, and disfluent pauses, hesitation phenomena

• breathing, pausing and interaction, turn-taking, discourse control

• forms and functions of voice quality in communication

• singing and its relation to phonation and breathing

• new technological or methodological development on the analysis of breathing, pausing, and the voice

• recourses and corpora

Submissions to SEFOS should be made in the form of extended abstracts, consisting of 2 pages of text plus a third page for (additional) figures and references. The abstract template is provided on the SEFOS website: www.sefos.dk.

Please submit your extended abstract to sefos@sdu.dk and indicate in your email whether you would prefer an oral or a poster presentation (A0 portrait).

Submission and deadlines

Deadline for submissions is the 30th of September. This deadline will NOT be extended!

Submissions will be subject to anonymous peer review by two reviewers. Information about acceptance/rejection will be provided on the 15th of October.

Note that the peer-review is only to check whether the submissions meet basic scientific standards concerning method and analysis. No papers that meet these standards will be excluded unless the maximum number of submissions (100) is exceeded. Therefore, we strongly encourage authors to register for SEFOS when submitting the paper or even earlier. All authors who register for SEFOS until 30 June only pay the reduced student fee of € 90,- !

Accepted contributions will have the opportunity to hand in revised abstracted until one week before the seminar. Accepted papers will be included on a SEFOS Proceedings USB drive (with ISBN number).

Note that authors of selected papers will have the opportunity to publish a full paper in a special issue of the International Journal of Linguistics (Acta Linguistica Hafniensia): https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=salh20

Registration fees

Regular participant: 150 €

Student participant (incl. PhD students): 90 €

The registration fee includes the SEFOS Proceedings, a conference bag, and free lunch breaks (food and soft drinks), a welcome reception, and a social event.

Organizing committee and contact

Oliver Niebuhr: Mads Clausen Institute, SDU Electrical Engineering, Centre for Industrial Electronics, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark.

Jana Neitsch: Mads Clausen Institute, SDU Electrical Engineering, Centre for Industrial Electronics, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark.

Kerstin Fischer: Dept. of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark.

Jan Michalsky: Chair of Technology Management, Friedrich-Alexander-University Nuremberg, Germany

Stephanie Berger: Dept. of General Linguistics, Institute of Scandinavian Languages, Frisian, and General Linguistics, Kiel University, Germany.