Association for Laboratory Phonology

The conference website for #LabPhon20 is now live: labphon.org/labphon20/home

#LabPhon 20 will happen in #Montréal, Québec, Canada, June 26–28, 2026, with additional pre-conference events on June 25. The call for papers and proposals for satellite workshops will be circulated in late August 2025.

We are excited to announce our #LabPhon Association's 2025 off-season programming, a series of three events on #prosody and #suprasegmentals. All events are scheduled during July and August, and they're FREE for ALP members. 😎 🌞 Info and registration are available here: labphon.org/content/summ...

A new perspective on the development of Quebec French rhotic vowels Quebec French is reportedly developing rhoticity, with low F3 resulting from a bunched or retroflexed tongue (like English /ɚ/), in some or all of the front mid rounded vowels /ø, œ, œ̃ /. The source ...

How do rare sound changes, like the development of rhotic vowels, actuate and spread? @massimolipari.github.io and @msonderegger.bsky.social show that rhotacization of 3 #QuebecFrench vowels emerges from an interplay of social + phonological pressures. #LabPhon #openaccess doi.org/10.16995/lab...

New insights into German #prosody! How do speakers & listeners distinguish utterance-medial vs. utterance-final #intonation boundaries in #German? Subtle differences in intonation, particularly in the rhyme's f0, are key cues for listeners. #LabPhon #openaccess #kinematics doi.org/10.16995/lab...

Final Devoicing before it happens: A large-scale study of word-final obstruents in French This paper investigates the phonetic precursors of Final Devoicing in a large corpus of natural French speech. We argue that this evaluation should consider the magnitude of the [voice] contrast, rath...

Is final devoicing as well-understood as we think? A new #LabPhon paper uses large #French corpora + Bayesian modeling to show its phonetic precursors fit typology better when viewed as multidimensional contrast neutralization. #openaccess doi.org/10.16995/lab...

Learning new speech sounds in remote and in-person protocols: Benefits, drawbacks, and considerations for future research In-laboratory training of novel speech sounds has provided significant insight into how adult language learners learn new sounds. However, this training is often costly in terms of time in lab for par...

New in #LabPhon: How well do adult language learners acquire new sound contrasts, in remote vs. in-laboratory environments? Results show that both paradigms result in learning, but there are trade-offs in both protocol types. @m2b2.bsky.social @spplab.bsky.social #openaccess doi.org/10.16995/lab...

Linguistic experience and social factors in speech perception: the case of merged speakers of Mandarin sibilants This work explores the combined effects of social expectations and a speaker’s production characteristics on the perception of alveolar versus retroflex sibilants that are variably merged in Taiwan Ma...

How are social expectations employed in cases of mergers in progress? A study of #TaiwanMandarin #sibilants finds that merged speakers may be somewhat desensitized to acoustic cues, but they readily employ social cues in speech perception. #sociophonetics #openaccess #LabPhon doi.org/10.16995/lab...

Remote data collection in the study of ongoing sound change in Spanish – a comparative analysis In this paper, I look at Canary Islands Spanish /p b/ lenition from a comparative perspective by examining the speech of the same participants produced on different occasions and under different circu...

Can unsupervised self-recordings help researchers capture more naturalistic speech when studying #soundchange? 🎤📱
A study of /p b/ #lenition in Canary Islands #Spanish shows that self-recordings pose some challenges but help reduce the observer’s paradox. #openaccess #LabPhon doi.org/10.16995/lab...

We're delighted to announce that #LabPhon20 will be held in Montréal, Québec, Canada, in the (North American) summer of 2026, with the theme “Looking back and looking forward.” Dates, thematic sessions, invited speakers and further information will be announced by the organizing committee. #LabPhon

At the margins: phonology and phonetics of Zongozotla Totonac glottalization Glottal stops and glottalized (“laryngealized”) vowels in Totonac and Tepehua languages are crucial for historical reconstructions, but their phonological and phonetic properties have often posed anal...

How marginal can phonological contrasts be? In Zongozotla #Totonac, phonation type and glottal stops are phonologically contrastive, but they are weakly differentiated phonetically and the glottal stops only surface phrase-finally. #LabPhon #openaccess #marginalcontrast doi.org/10.16995/lab...

Contrastive vowel length and segment duration in production and perception in Djambarrpuyŋu This paper deals with segment duration and phonological length in production and perception in the Australian language Djambarrpuyŋu. It provides an acoustic phonetic account of vowel and consonant du...

Vowel and consonant duration vary inversely in Australian #Yolngu language Djambarrpuyŋu, so what’s contrastive? A pair of #speechproduction and #speechperception studies show that V length is contrastive, though both V & C duration influence perception. #LabPhon #openaccess doi.org/10.16995/lab...

Pharyngealization in Tashlhiyt from kinematic and acoustic perspectives This study investigated the implementation of pharyngealization in Tashlhiyt, across various linguistic contexts VCV, VCCV, VCCV, and VCCCV. We analyzed articulatory and acoustic data from six male sp...

How is pharyngealization realized in across linguistic contexts? In #Tashlhiyt, it's signaled in #coronals by a lowered tongue body & lowered F2 in nearby vowels, which can extend into larger phonetic domains. doi.org/10.16995/lab... #openaccess #LabPhon @phbuech.bsky.social @annehermes.bsky.social

Lenition, fortition, and lexical access in Iwaidja and Mawng Many models of word recognition assume that spoken words are faithful to their phonological shape in the lexicon and that word recognition begins with the first incoming segment and proceeds linearly....

Most models of #word recognition assume the input is faithful to #phonological specifications in the #lexicon, but it's not always the case. Results from #lenition in #Mawng & #Iwaidja explore how recognition occurs in such scenarios. @bjbaker.bsky.social #LabPhon #openaccess doi.org/10.16995/lab...

The effect of listener dialect experience on perceptual adaptation to and generalization of a novel vowel shift When adapting to novel vowel shifts, listeners rely on the systematicity of novel variants across vowel categories (e.g., parallel shifts), even when only part of a novel system is presented. We exami...

How does dialect exposure affect perceptual adaptation to a novel vowel shift? New results from regional US dialects explore listeners' behaviors via lexical decision tasks to understand the mechanisms governing perceptual adaptation and generalization. #openaccess #LabPhon doi.org/10.16995/lab...

Audiovisual enhancement of vowel contrast: Production and perception of the cot-caught contrast in Chicago This paper considers whether vowel systems are organized not only around principles of auditory-acoustic dispersion, but also around non-auditory perceptual factors, specifically vision. Three experim...

In #Chicago the #vowels LOT & THOUGHT are in flux—how do speakers maintain their contrast? #Articulatory & perceptual results from @jhavenhill.bsky.social show that lip rounding, not necessarily tongue position, provides visual & auditory differentiation. #openaccess #LabPhon doi.org/10.16995/lab...

No prosody-syntax trade-offs: Prosody marks focus in Mandarin cleft constructions In line with the idea that language has evolved to be efficient and to avoid redundancy, syntactic means of marking information structure have been derived from prosodic ones, and vice versa, for many...

Linguists have often observed prosody-syntax interactions in #informationstructure marking, but do speakers rely less on #prosody when #clefting already marks focus? In #Mandarin #Chinese, such tradeoffs aren't found in production or perception: doi.org/10.16995/lab... #LabPhon #openaccess

Raw acoustic vs. normalized phonetic convergence: Imitation of the Northern Cities Shift in the American Midwest Word shadowing tasks elicit phonetic convergence to the stimulus model talkers, suggesting a tight perception-production link. The magnitude of this convergence is affected by linguistic and social fa...

In word shadowing tasks, do participants imitate formant frequencies or vowel shifts? Given the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, talkers imitate normalized phonetic properties of NCVS vowels, not the overall high F1,F2 frequencies of the model talker. #openaccess #LabPhon doi.org/10.16995/lab...

Hello, Bluesky! This is the account for the Association for Laboratory Phonology, #LabPhon. Follow here to learn about new publications in our journal, and other Association news.

#linguistics #phonetics #phonology