GenSpecS Research Collective

We’re recruiting for participants in our study exploring natural language production and the perception of language differences at various linguistic levels including discourse analysis, conversational analysis, narrative analysis, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistic variation, phonetics, phonology and pragmatics. The research questions we are posing involve the intersections of cognition, agency, variation and social identity construction.

See our GenSpecS website for more information: https://sites.google.com/view/genspecs/homeaccueil


Sociolinguistic, Psycholinguistic, and Formal Perspectives on Meaning

SIRL member James Sneed German and collaborators will be presenting two papers at the workshop on Sociolinguistic, Psycholinguistic, and Formal Perspectives on Meaning in Paris from July 2-3, 2018.

The first paper, by James Sneed German, is entitled “Lee Kuan Yew at the barbecue: When social enrichment interacts with propositional content.” 

The second, co-authored by Kiwako Ito, James Sneed German, Caterina Petrone and Elisa Sneed German, is entitled “Effects of intonation on the multi-dimensional interpretation of requests and offers.”

IGALA 10 – International Gender and Language Association Biennial Conference

SIRL member LeAnn Brown, in collaboration with other SIRL team members, will be presenting two papers at the IGALA biennial conference in Gaborone, Botswana from June 20-22, 2018:

Quantifying qualitative listener assessments of gender ambiguous speakers: Coding lexical
data to measure social distance
Brown, L., Abbou, J., Reid-Collins, O., Mahrt, T., and J. German
Voice-based sexual orientation ratings: Exploring phonetic indexation and potential effects
on social outcomes
Brown, L.

LeAnn Brown and Karl Neergaard have joined SIRL

We are very pleased to announce that our team has grown: LeAnn Brown and Karl Neergaard joined us in June as postdoctoral researchers on the SIRL project. LeAnn is a Canadian sociolinguist, specializing in sociophonetic variation and change with a focus on the perception of gender and sexual orientation. Karl has focused on psycholinguistic experimentation of speech perception and production.

AMLaP 2017

Seung Kyung Kim and James Sneed German will be presenting a poster at AMLaP (Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing) 2017 held in Lancaster, UK from September 7-9, 2017.  Click here for the abstract of the poster, entitled “Facial Expressions and Phonetic Recalibration in Speech Perception”.

Tone and Intonation (TIE 2016)

SIRL members and collaborators participated in the TIE 2016 Conference from September 1 to 3, 2016 at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

Talks and posters included the following subjects:

Perception of contrastive focus by L2 learners  — Shinobu Mizuguchi, Koichi Tateishi & Tim Mahrt

Realization of the French initial accent: Stability and individual differences — Pauline Welby, Roxane Bertrand, Cristel Portes, Corine Astésano