Brief colloquium report: The Phoneme: new applications of an old concept

Today I poked my head out of my screen to take a break and attend this very interesting talk by Dom Watt, whose Advanced Phonetics student I'm lucky enough to be at the moment.

Here is the abstract:

And below is my own summary, written in one sitting (as usual!). As always, any inaccuracy or misapprehension of what was presented is entirely my fault. Hope this all makes sense to you!

The talk had the notion of phoneme at the centre, and all the debates existing around its "existence". The first minutes of the talk were a nice overview of the "phoneme" and related notions and ideas leading to it through time: from the contributions of the sanscrit author Patañjali in the 2nd century recognising abstract categories of sound that present variability at the physical level, and the first Icelandic grammarians in the 12th century, to the writings of Sapir in the 1920 and the "phoneme slices" that people claim to have in their languages.

More modern discussions ensued of what the phoneme came to be understood as have been developed by Duriche-Desgenetes (1873), Luis Havet, Badoin de Courtenay (1871) with psychophonetics and physiophonetics, and of course, Henry Sweet in the 1870s and Daniel Jones already in 1911.  In the US in the early 20th century, the notion of phoneme came to surface thanks to Bloomfield.

A few definitions of phoneme were revisted by Watt, especially those by Jones (1957), Watt (2009), and a very quote by Pike (1947): "Phonetics gathers raw material. Phonemics cooks it".

A very useful metaphor to discuss phonemes and allophones was recalled by Dom, that of Clark Kent and Superman as being in complementary distribution, and Superman and Spiderman for example being two different allophones of two different phonemes. (It reminded me that I used to refer to phonemes as any of us, and allophonic variants as us in our roles and attires: at school, at a party....Lately I've turned to Johnny Depp as the phoneme, and his million characters as his allophones, his "realisations" in films...)
Other interesting comparisons were introduced, such as the grapheme-allograph relations in Arabic, or even the number of ways we can represent a certain letter, say "A", which poses a very interesting question: what is the boundary that makes a certain sound no longer the same, how much can variation be stretched, what is the boundary?

Alternative analysis of the phoneme included Trubetzkoy's (1939) phonemic oppositions grounded in phonetics, formal notions of phonemes as bundles of features, as those put forward by Jakobson, Fant and Halle in 1952, based on acoustic analyses of instantaneous "time slices" (somehow looking for the centre of events in the signal). Watt also mentioned a game-changer, the work of Chomsky and Halle (1968), that abandons binarity and allows for phonetic gradation with the introduction of articulatory features in their description.

Watt continued the presentation by referring to the debates on the nature and existence of the phoneme that included quotes from Ladd (2013:370) and Dresher (2011:241). The work by Fowler, Shankweiler and Studdert-Kennedy (2016), who revisit a paper they themselves wrote in 1967, was given special attention, since it provides nine forms of evidence of the existence of the phoneme as an entity, including issues like phonemic awareness, adult visual word recognition, the presence of systematic phonological and morphological processes, the existence of speech errors (spoonerisms), and the fact that co-articulation, as was previously claimed, does not really eliminate the presence of a phoneme.

Of course, as Dom remarks, when we look at MRIs, spectograms and waveforms, we may not so easily be able to see discrete units, but machines seem to be programmed to see the signal as composed of chunks. It was interesting to see a cochleargram, because as Watt pointed out, it does show perhaps more continuity than a wide-band spectogram, for instance.

The second part of the talk discussed phonemes in phonetic work done through speech technology, for forensic and also sociophonetic purposes. It discussed some of the findings by (the absolutely brilliant!) PhD student Georgina Brown, who has adapted the ACCDIST programme by Mark Huckvale in UCL into Y-ACCDIST as part of her PhD research. One of the achievements of Y-ACCDIST is the use of the software for speaker comparison even when the data are not necessarily comparable (ACCDIST works well when all speakers have read the same text). I cannot fully do justice to this part of the talk because there are some technical bits that I am not familiar with, and I don't have a head for statistics, but I'll report on what I could follow:
Some examples of the use of the programme were presented, which include the measurement of distance between possible pairs of phonemes through what is known as a Feature Selection process, in which several features are left out to focus on the ones which are most relevant or less redundant, and that helps modelling.
Comparisons across speakers were run through the programme, and Y-ACCDIST was able to assign speakers to a particular accent with almost 90% accuracy. It was interesting to hear that the programme was more accurate when particular features (and not the whole) set was compared, and also when human intervention in the filtering of features to be compared was added to the speaker accent allocation process.
All in all, Watt concludes, the discoveries of the application of tools like Y-ACCDIST and the evidence provided in Fowler et al suggest that it is too premature to declare the demise of the phoneme.
The question period was interesting, and it included comments on issues like the fact that perhaps many approaches to speech analysis begin from the notion of the phoneme but fail to see what happens in naturalistic speech and what participants themselves feel is relevant, and that there is considerable phenomena that cannot be explained through the notion of the phoneme. There is always a search for robustness in experimental settings that fails to see that what should be more robust is what is actually done in natural situations.

All in all, a fascinating talk, with a lot of food for thought. If you ask me, does the phoneme exist? I would say that it's like magic, you feel it's there but at times you cannot pinpoint the actual trick that makes it work.

Brief conf report: English UK North Academic - University of Liverpool, October 7th.

Yesterday I got on the train from York to Liverpool (in what ended up being an endless 3 1/2 train-train-bus journey...yes, transport may also fail in Britain!) to attend and present at the English UK North Academic conference (programme here).

It was a really friendly, welcoming environment of teachers of English working in the North of the UK, and there must have been over 100 attendees.  I would like to very briefly report on three of the talks, and then comment on my own presentation as well.

Michaela Seserman from the University of Liverpool discussed the tools she uses in her EAP courses to do pronunciation work. Michaela discussed some important questions we need to ask prior to deciding to use certain apps, and also weighed some pros and cons of each. Seserman proposed a form of integration of the in-built voice recognition systems that smartphones currently hold, the tools that Quizlet offers, and the messaging possibilities of the WeChat platform. Even though it was perhaps not very clear how pronunciation improvement actually came to happen, the idea of teacher and students exchanging audio recordings for practice and dictation via mobile messaging is a very appealing one. As Michaela pointed out, these are tasks that learners can also spontaneously decide to do outside class.

Russell Stannard, the TeacherTrainingVids guy, showed how screen capture software (he recommends SnagIt but there are free alternatives available) can help you give better feedback on written work. So a teacher may videocapture a student's written assignment and give feedback (as we might do face-to-face), by highlighting areas of the essay, for instance, and making oral comments on it, or showing the assignment instructions on screen to point out what may not have been addressed. It reminds me of the type of recorded feedback I used to give my students, and I agree with Russell that this whole idea of personalising feedback and having a sort of "conversation" with the student and the material really does make a difference. It's a way of "being there" when you cannot "be there", while also showing students we care for them individually and that we can address each of their specific strengths and challenges -which in writing we may fail to do clearly, or which may be misinterpreted-.

I particularly enjoyed the workshop on corpus linguistics by Dr. Vander Viana from the University of Stirling. Vander showed us some easily accessible corpora (sorry, readers, but I cannot ensure that this will be freely accessible to you in your context/country) and search engines that we can use to help our students test the frequency, acceptability and likelihood of their lexical choices when writing, or speaking. We discussed collocations, colligation, and semantic prosody (which apparently in corpus ling is different from how we understand it in SFL!), and we reflected on the claim that we actually process speech in an "idiomatic" way (not referring to idioms, but to chunks....it was such a great intro point to my own talk later, to be honest!). Most of the cited material came from Sinclair (1991); McCarthy et al (2005); and Tognini-Bonelli (2001), and you can read Viana's work if you visit his webpage.

I was invited to make a presentation thanks to the generosity of Mark Hancock, who put my name forward (I've thanked him publicly many times, but I believe we should always be grateful to the ones who do nice things for us)...and to make it even better, he got me a PronPack t-shirt! And also thanks to Nigel Paramor.

Even though I know my stuff, it is always a bit intimidating to stand in a room full of native speakers of English who teach English and theorise about their own language. I know it is a silly fear, but I know many other non-native teachers of English will sympathise. Anyway.

My talk ("Intonation building blocks for more comprehensive speaking skills training") was based on the type of speaking tasks that I designed for my Lab 3 and Lab 4 lessons at ISP Joaquín V González and Profesorado del Consudec during the last few years. Some background: most of the work that is done during the final two Applied Phonetics modules ("Lab") in teacher training in Buenos Aires (at least) is related to the application of phonological theory to the production of different speech genres (and for this, I am grateful to Prof. Silvina Iannicelli, because I got my first lecturing post filling in for her at ENSLV SBS in 2006, and she had a course planned along a sequence of texts ranging from rehearsed to more spontaneous text type production, and that sort of sparked my interest in the prosodic configuration of speech genres). As I became a bit more experienced, one of the things that usually made me uncomfortable about the type of work we did in these courses was that most of the tasks were based on reading, and there was always an assumption that intonation patterns were easily/automatically transferrable to spoken situations of language use. (It's a bit like doing a million fill-in-the-gap past tense exercises, and then expecting students to automatically and spontaneously use the simple past in their written or spoken stories.)

Plus, at times we also forget that reading aloud is an ability in itself, and that reading aloud as a result of previous imitation of a recorded model of the same text is also another type of ability that activates other skills and requirements. These are highly useful and valuable steps in the process, but they do not amount to, nor ensure, that the students will appropriate intonation patterns. In my tutoring experience, I have had students producing English fall-rises in reading and Spanish rise-falls on the exact same phrase, on a similar context, when speaking.

So at some point in my tutoring/lecturing history, I decided to change that a little, and to use reading aloud as one of the steps of the process, but then also create opportunities for use in slightly more spontaneous speech tasks in a way that ensures that students need to use certain intonation patterns that have been found to have a certain regularity in specific speech genres, or in connection to certain lexico-grammatical structures.

So, back to EUKN: My talk was about speech genres, and how several speech genres have higher degrees of "writtenness" in them (Eggins, 1994), and how these have perhaps more easily predictable and stable patterns of intonation and chunking; whereas more interactive genres challenge the intonational descriptions as we know them (such in the case of "list intonation", or the intonation of questions).

I put forward the metaphor of building blocks as a means of proposing that for some speech genres, it is useful to see information units (and some lexicogrammatical collocations) as part of the same block that students can monitor as a whole as they plan their next block (rather than worrying about putting together a string of words, one after the next, when they talk).

I have followed a process that goes from the breaking of the dichotomy between spoken vs written texts, into a continuum of levels of writtenness-spokenness (as SFL scholars have done for a couple of decades), and the use of a building block metaphor consisting of LEGO type blocks that occur in more written-like spoken genres (where the blocks have a set role, position, and the final goal is clear), and TETRIS blocks that we may encounter in more interactive texts (where trajectories are built as we go along, and there are lower levels of pre-planning.

I will only be able to share a few of my slides, as I am writing an article/resource on the whole notion and application of intonation blocks (and I'm also seeking psycholinguistic and further classroom evidence), and I owe the English UK North attendees the preview of the full set of slides (because I have authorised EUKN to do so).

Some comments on challenging, through corpus-study, the notions of "question intonation", and "list intonation". How intonation in real life as manifested in different speech genres does not easily exhibit the intonation patterns described in ELT textbooks.

Reflection upon the fact that we generally don't do speaking training in an integrated manner, as we may do with written genres.

Possible (though never definitive, nor exhaustive, nor always fixed, because language use.... ;) ) organisation of different speech genres along a cline.

The building block metaphor I propose to inform lexico-grammatical, sequential and intonational choices.

An example of a production task (which probably we have done in our lessons a million times!) that we can exploit to teach step-ups in pitch, and contrastive accent.

Examples of lexico-grammatical blocks in initial position that do anticipatory work. These have been found to be quite consistent in LEGO types of texts (the ordering and tone choice works differently in interactive texts)

Example of an outline for student production of short conversational stories that focus on grammatical choices and the preparatory (loop) or advancing (increment) contextualisation by rising or falling tones (respectively)

Example of ways in which we can contextualise reported speech through level tones and contrastive stress in TETRIS-like situations of language use (though also common, with direct speech, in speeches, or lectures, LEGO text types)

Examples of ways in which we can create opportunities for use of level tones in conversational lists (vs counting, or sequences of steps where lists may be found to have rising tones)

During the presentation, I systematised briefly some of these (basically, it was like teaching my whole Phonetics 2 syllables in 50 minutes!) and presented a number of activities to illustrate how we can generate opportunities for use of these building blocks, and then, of course, it is up to every teacher to find ways of helping students monitor their spoken texts, block by block. 

I am sure that the idea of working on speech chunks is not new, or revolutionary, but I wish to emphasise how intonation can be an active, essential, part of each of these blocks of processing and production, and how the notion of a block can contribute to students' awareness that linguistic structures work together, making different contributions in the contextualisation of meaning and structural organisation of speech.

(And the refs!)

All in all, this was a really enjoyable event, and very special for me, as I haven't been teaching for a year (starting this week again, yay!) and I spent this whole year trying to find an excuse to write down the principles and ideas that informed my integrative intonation teaching methods when I was lecturing in Buenos Aires. Hope they make sense to you!

(And now...back to my research. Enough productive procrastination!)

P.S.: this post somehow opened up a chest of memories for me, and I forgot to acknowledge another lecturer, Prof. Claudia Gabriele, who in her own way showed me that there are ways of "creating opportunities" for practice of intonation. I was her Lab assistant for a few years, and I was particularly inspired by her use of role plays and other speaking tasks for a more natural application of intonation patterns. Sorry about this unintentional omission in the original post.

Brief report: some phon-related talks at IPrA 2017 in Belfast (July 16-21)

Hello, hello! Hope you are all doing well. Life over here is hectic, as usual, and a few days ago I decided I had to take a holiday after a year (or more) of basically working non-stop, so I'm back at work now, with renewed energy, for a while, at least.

Two weeks ago I attended the fantastic International Pragmatics Association conference in Belfast (hashtag to look up lots of live-tweeting: #ipra2017). I was there in Antwerp in 2015 (see report on panel on prosody, parts 1 and 2), and it was great to be back in this craze of six days of talks and papers and coffee breaks with colleagues, friends, and "academic crushes" (!). I have to admit I was a bit emotional as well, because two years ago at this conference all I was dreaming of was my PhD at York with all this inspiring people, and today, here I am! (Dreams do come true, folks, you just need to work really hard...only to keep working hard!)

I have to say that the number of phonetics-related talks was disappointingly small (see the book of abstracts here), and there was so much overlap (15 concurrent sessions or more!) that I could not see all the presentations I would have liked to see. From an Interactional Linguistic/Conversation Analytic perspective to the study of phonetics/prosody, three universities stood out: University of York & University of Sheffield (UK), and Universität Potsdam (Germany), and I am going to briefly comment on some of the talks I have seen. After my report of each talk, I have included my own remarks and reflections in italics.

Richard Ogden: "The actions of peripheral linguistic objects: clicks"

Undoubtedly, Ogden is one of the people who has studied clicks as a resource in interaction most widely (see a past lecture here). In this presentation, Ogden addressed issues such as how co-participants themselves establish what actions (if any) can be ascribed to clicks. Ogden studied clicks pre-, mid- and post-positioned in TCUs, and also standalone ones, and he has found them to do interactional work for the regulation of turns or sequence (as a "metronome" for the handling of transition space across turns, for example), and/or the display of affect. What is interesting about clicks is that they are not easily manipulated prosodically, but they may co-occur with peaks of embodied activity: examples shown included raised eyebrows, shifts in body posture, and tracing gestures.  In this particular presentation, clicks followed by other continuations (pre-positioned clicks) and standalone clicks treated as a form insufficient response were studied. Participants were found to make sense of clicks in interaction and/or orient to them through their positioning, their deployment in frequent collocations and usages, and through iconicity in their mirroring in next position, or the marking of incipient speakership.

Some of the conclusions after some careful analysis of data and participant orientation (that is, not through analyst-imposed categories but through participant behaviour in the next turn, as we do in CA) has led Ogden to conclude that:

• clicks in these positions must be deliberate
• the lack of accompanying verbal material makes participants reliant on other practices to interpret them
• clicks are interpreted by participants in interaction through: positioning, multimodality, dialogic practices such as rhythm or mirroring.

Clicks are really exciting, and we use clicks and percussives so very often in speech even though they are not phonemic in English or Spanish as they are in many African languages. I have to admit I "fish" for clicks when I listen to my friends' WhatsApp recordings...fascinating!

Traci (Curl) Walker: "The differential design of other-repetition in repair initiation: does form follow function, or function follow form?"

As one of the organisers of the panel that discussed the function-form conundrum (because yes, this is a massive debate in linguistics!), Walker studied other-repetitions in response position. She reported some of the findings in the use of repetitions in interaction, such as the initiation of repair (because of acceptability issues), the checking of understanding, and the display of surprise. Walker identified two types of other-repetitions in her study: framing, and prefacing ones.

Framing repetitions consist of a sequence in which B repeats a part of what A has said, and A repeats/completes the rest. These were found to be hearing or understanding checks, mostly (suspending the display of understanding), and these have been cases where the first turn-compoments are picked up in repetition by interlocutors. Walker found these to be produced with the following prosodic parameters, completion-inducing in a way:

• tempo: slower than first saying
• final syllable lengthening
• flat pitch contour (rises < 2ST)
• articulatory features: audible release of final plosives, glottal constrictions rare

Prefacing repetitions, on the other hand, include situations where  B repeats a part of what A has said, but B keeps on talking, and in this case, turn-final components are the ones repeated. Most of these cases were followed by an explicit request for repair or further information. Prosodically, they were found to be produced with anticipatory phonetic design, thus:

• tempo: slower than 1st mention
• quieter in loudness
• falling in pitch

Walker concluded that "form and function should be one, joined in spiritual union (sic)".

The form-function debate is a huge thing, and it affects me deeply as a former trainer in Applied Phonetics for speakers of English as a foreign language. The thing is that as teachers we rely a lot on form-function mappings, and for many years, I have felt very guilty when trying to systematise intonation because many of these mappings only work in restricted contexts, and after all, the real "meaning" of linguistic features in interaction is dependent on participant orientation, something we very hardly focus on. 

When analysing conversation and asking my students to decide on intonation patterns, I have tried (with varied degrees of success) to get them to focus on what co-participants do after something has been uttered, in order to trace how a certain stretch of talk has been interpreted (oriented to), what type of action has been ascribed to it. But I know I have sadly fallen into many of the form-function connections that Walker criticises (which, to be fair, ALL textbooks are filled with), due to the need for simplication for teaching purposes. In my defence, at least I know I have not "sinned" with contextless text analysis: context and genre were always at the heart of my intonation-teaching practices, however lacking in other things they may have been.

 The teaching of prosody in ELT and the training of teachers, in my humble opinion, would really benefit from following a conversation-analytic, inductive, qualitative approach (something I will rant about in my upcoming PTLC conference presentation!).

Susanne Reinhardt: "Tying next turns to question-answer sequences: How links between linguistic forms contextualize different kinds of sequence continuation"

Susanne is a PhD student from Potsdam, and has made a very interesting presentation on format tying in post-expansions after question-answer sequences (if you want to know the basics about post-expansions, see this chapter by Sidnell here). She described how clusters of linguistic features helped disambiguate between minimal or non-minimal post-expansions. Reinhard has found that minimal post-expansion initiators had narrow pitch span, and general lowering of pitch values in relation to the question turn, as well as some degree of prosodic matching with the question turn. Non-minimal post-expansion initiators, on the other had, had a wider pitch range, a medianization of pitch values (moving towards the median), and a clear contrast between the question-answer pair, and the third position, initiator of the expansion.

Dagmar Barth-Weingarten: "Discourse units in English interaction: a prosodic-phonetic perspective"

This was one of my favourite talks in the conference (together with other non-phon talks by Pillet-Shore, Raymond, Hoey, and Heritage). Barth-Weingarten discussed the bases of what she proposes in her new book, a boundary-based approach (rather, a "cesura"-based approach) to the analysis of speech "segmentation" (being particularly careful here not to discuss the notion of "units", which Barth-Weingarten somehow argues against).  The presenter made a very thorough review of different approaches to chunking, and discourse and conversation units, and focused on the similarities and differences between them, as well as the problems, some of which stem from the use of "monologic" data, or the mapping of chunks with syntax or specific pre-determined phonetic parameters. Since units in the end are an epiphenomenon of segmentation in talk as it happens, in order to avoid analyst-imposed categories, Barth-Weingarten proposed focusing on what creates discontinuities in talk, that is, what clusters of features appear to break the flow of talk (which, she states, are in fact what co-participants orient to in the online processing of talk, rather than the units) and how these prosodic parameters display differing degrees of cesuring. By looking at data, real recorded interaction (non-monological), the presenter identified a number of parameters that have a role in marking different degrees of cesuring, including pitch movement, voice quality, tempo, rhtyhm, articulatory features, settings and processes (especially in terms of release, aspiration and glottal constriction), and pauses. 

I see and love the points and criticism made in the presentation and the book to the different theories of "chunking" (tonality). I have done corpus work on this, and I have found syntax-information structure and prosody mappings in pseudo-monological speech (lectures, stories, some speeches). Most of the materials I have developed for my students on this work quite well for these generic types, but it's completely true that when it comes to talk-in-interaction, chunking is fuzzy, and less explicitly (at least) rule-governed. 

At times I think that in ELT we see texts, even oral texts, as finished products. We forget about the essential value of online, emergent speech as it develops. In my intonation lessons, I always felt guilty when asking students to work on texts, because of the unnaturalness of having to see something already developed and treat it as if it was developing. But then again, we need to make peace with the fact that there are different tasks and activities meant to teach and test different things, and having to do transcription or reading aloud work for intonation practice, if applied properly, is a way of testing what was taught. However, if I had the chance to re-plan my intonation courses, I am sure I would go for activities that foreground this developing, online planning aspect of speech, which I did, to a certain extent, with my "first-sight speaking" tasks (emergent, prompt-induced speech tasks) in some advanced courses. 

The following are talks I would have liked to see, but couldn't (refer to the book of abstracts to read about them!):

• Elena Becker: "Closing telephone conversations: The role of prosody"
• Marjorie H Goodwin "The intertwining of touch, prosody, and voice"
• Adriana Cáldiz "Prosody and evidentiality: About how some intonational features pertain the roots of discourse in the Spanish of Buenos Aires"
• Brown & Prieto: "Multimodal (Im)Politeness"
• Jesús Romero-Trillo: "The pragmatics of prosody in intercultural communication"

All in all, my IPrA 2017 experience was fantastic, and it spurred on me further feelings of passion about what I do and what I would like to do with my research, while at the same time stirring some of those feelings of inadequacy that come with taking some distance from one's teaching and thinking about what one would have liked to do better, or differently. I wrote a short commentary of what this conference was like for me as a postgraduate student at the ROLSI (Research on Language and Social Interaction) blog here, if you are interested.

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I am aware that my posts lately may have been a bit too technical, and yes, at the moment this blog seems to be a way of trying to make sense of English phonetics in real life (now that English is so readily available for me everyday), and my own past practices as a pronunciation teacher. I am sure I have done many things right, and if I see what my students have been able to achieve, and how many of them actually liked the subject and approached it passionately, I am sure I must have done quite a few things well. However, I am still trying, in my head, to find the best possible way to introduce the prosody of English to speakers of other languages based on what happens in real life (and not on the analysts' head as I am sad to see in many textbooks!), and I pretty much guess this will be an ambition to keep me going for a couple of decades.

Colloquium report #1: Researching, Learning and Training Late Second Language Speech', by Kazuya Saito

Hi, there! I've been looking for excuses to blog before my read-load and write-load become bigger than they already are, and I have found one! Every Wednesday, one of my Departments (yes, I am member of both the Language and Linguistics and the Education departments) has a colloquium, and today's talk was highly relevant to us, pron-lovers.

Kazuya Saito, from Birbeck Uni in London, has presented the results of his research on late L2 acquisition. "Late" acquirers would be those individuals who start learning a second language after puberty, here defined as people aged 16 onwards. His study involved Japanese speakers in their late teens and adults who had settled in Canada.

Find my (informal) report on the event below, with a few of my own comments, of course. (The usual disclaimer: all misinterpretations or misrepresentations of the info presented are my own)

***

The talk began by reviewing two well-known models of L1 and L2 acquisition (or actually, "learning"? That is a whole separate debate....): the Speech Learning Model (SLM) by Flege (1993, 003, 2009), and the Critical Period Hypothesis (for this, Saito quotes Abrahamsson 2012, DeKeyser 2013, but the CPH dates from much earlier). Saito claims that these theories trigger different predictions as to what could happen to late learners.

The SPM would predict that enough exposure ("experience effects") to L2 will help learners to invoke those speech learning abilities that we applied for our L1, so age will have an effect on their ultimate level attainment, and so will the length of residence in a foreign country. The CPH, on the other hand, predicts that near nativelikeness is not attainable after puberty, which would affect late learners, and it also establishes that the skills employed for the learning of a second language involve general cognition -that is, explicit and intentional processes - rather than the explicit and incidental language-specific processes. (This latter point, I think, is very, very important when it comes to favouring explicit pronunciation instruction. However, the role of explicit pronunciation instruction was somehow argued against -or downplayed- in this presentation). In other words, for the CPH, the effects of the length of residence will also be limited.

This lit review finished with references to conflicting results in studies related to the effect of length of residence and age (mental note: go back to Linda Grant's (2014) edited volume for examples!). There was also a reference to something that is highlighted in other studies I have read, the role of motivation and aptitude as well in determining the levels of ultimate attainment. What is more, the presenter made some slight criticism to the methods employed in some of the studies, as they focused on native speaker evaluation of accents globally. Thus, Saito's "niche" lies in the focus on one specific pronunciation feature: the Japanese flap [ɾ] vs English /r/. (Two comments: I have used /r/ for the English version because it was not very clear to me whether the target was an actual retroflex approximant [ɻ], or the alveolar [ɹ] one. And for the Japanese sound, the alveolar tap symbol was used, but in the speaker's description, I often wondered if it was not the alveolar lateral flap [ɺ] that was referred to. The Handbook of the IPA says that for Japanese it's [ɽ], actually, so I should have asked! ).

The difficulties that Japanese speakers face when it comes to English /r/ are threefold: two of these are related to adjusting cues already present in Japanese: the retraction of the tongue body -shown as the lowering of F2 values, acoustically speaking -(which is why I guess the target /r/ is a retroflex, perhaps) and the prolongation of length/duration; whereas the new feature for these learners would be  the presence of labial, alveolar and pharyngeal constructions, manifested acoustically in the lowering of F3.

The study was aimed at discovering some patterns in terms of the effect of AOA (age of acquisition) and LOR (length of residence), and it involved a number of Japanese people who had moved to Canada after they had turned 16, and most of them had only had instruction in English at school -using a Grammar Translation method, according to the presenter-. They have all been described as being "highly motivated" to attain a high level of English because of their need to communicate. The experiment consisted of testing the subjects' production of English /r/ in a picture-description spontaneous production task (adapted from Munro and Mann, 2007). In all the pictures there were target words with /r/, and in order to make sure participants were tested in a more spontaneous situation, the first 3 descriptions were presented as being "for practice", and the other four were used for the test.

The results of the study revealed the following:

• In terms of tongue retraction, most participants improved over their first six months of residence, and after that period, in this respect, their performance was deemed native-like.
• As for duration, the correlations were significant after 12 months of residence.
• When it came to the development of the new parameters (F3), levels of attainment were diverse and late acquirers were definitely at a disadvantage (only those moving to Canada before the age of 20 achieved better results in this study), but definitive changes were seen after 10 years of residence (!).

(Very interesting!)

Some implications for teaching were mentioned later. (I have to admit that this is perhaps where I would disagree the most, but it is true that I have worked in non-immersion contexts, and things are definitely different there). Based on these results, Saito contended that an effective tool is the use of contextualised instruction over explicit instruction of the target sound. Some of the activities mentioned included the use of prompted discussion and role plays with target words that were corrected on the spot. Some included /l,r/ minimal pairs, others did not. The testing of these activities after training students for 4 hours in two weeks rendered an improvement in students' /r/ sounds from 60% to 75%. (Plus, the "shock effect" of constant correction cannot, of course, be underrated, if these are highly motivated students!) In my view, explicit pronunciation instruction (because of the employment of these cognitive procedures mentioned earlier) is necessary to help create these new articulatory habits. I do, however, strongly make a case for contextualised and communicative pronunciation work, but not as the entry point to learn the sounds, but to make explicit instruction somehow transferrable to more spontaneous contexts (and this is, after all, the end result that Saito was seeking).

There were some very brief, but interesting questions. The issue of U-shaped learning and plateaus that is described in some psycholinguistic theories (if I remember correctly, Major's Ontogeny model, for example?) was brought up, inviting in a way the exploration of a more diachronic study of the same subjects. Another issue mentioned is whether a similar effect would be reached for the training of VOT as a low functional load feature, which was considered non-distinctive (well, I may have disagree with that, I believe that both VOT and vowel length can be distinctive in native-speaker's ears, no matter their allophonic status!).

All in all, it was a very interesting and thought-provoking talk with many implications for pronunciation teaching, both in immersion and other ESOL contexts. And a confession: at first, I was doubtful about attending a talk about Japanese, but I have to admit this whole uni experience has really widened my horizons to all the beauty and human and cultural wealth there is in this world.

International Conference of Phonetic Sciences (#ICPhS2015) - Glasgow, August 10-14th.

ICPhS. For any phonetician, this conference is just THE conference. Unfortunately, I could not attend (don't get me started on why because I'll start sobbing), but all the live-tweeting, the online conference proceedings and the Periscope streaming of some of the plenaries made all the 12,000 km distance somehow shorter.

This post is aimed providing you with a "hub" or "central station" of links you can consult if you want to catch up with what happened at the conference. (I will try to keep this list up with new stuff that I may find under the tag "ICPhS2015" in my Scoop.it collection of web resources)

-Official Conference Website:
http://www.icphs2015.info/
-Book of Abstracts
http://www.icphs2015.info/upldrctry/book_of_abstracts.pdf
-Programme at a glance (includes links to the proceedings! Just click on the presentation that interests you and...voilá! You get access to the paper!) 
http://www.icphs2015.info/pdfs/detailedprogramme.htm

-Official Tagboard - Collection of all social media citing #ICPhS2015 (this is a very dynamic and entertaining way of keeping up with what is going on in all fronts!)
https://tagboard.com/icphs2015/236834

-(Unofficial) Instagram collection for #ICPhS2015
http://pinsta.me/tag/icphs2015


-Official Storify collections, day by day
Day 1:
https://storify.com/mariawolters/icphs-glasgow-day-one-oral-sessions
https://storify.com/mariawolters/icphs-day-one-discussant-sessions
https://storify.com/mariawolters/icphs-glasgow-day-one

Day 2
https://storify.com/ICPhS2015/day-two-of-icphs-2015-poster-sessions
https://storify.com/ICPhS2015/day-two-of-icphs-oral-sessions

Day 3
https://storify.com/ICPhS2015/day-three-of-icphs-oral-and-satellite-session

Day 4
https://storify.com/ICPhS2015/day-four-icphs-2015

Day 5
https://storify.com/ICPhS2015/day-5-icphs-2015

Plenty of stuff to catch up with before Melbourne 2019!

Report on the Phonetics Teaching and Learning Conference (#PTLC2015) at UCL. August 5-7th, 2015 - Part 3

This is my last report on PTCL 2015. My two previous posts discussed Day 1 and Day 2, including links to all the live tweeting and the programme, so you can visit this page to read about them, and about other events I have reported on.


I have tried to link to the author's webpages/institutional affiliations whenever possible so that you can contact them, or Google their work and learn more about what they do.


(Once more, just in case, I would like to remind you that any unintentional misinterpretation of the work on the presenters is my fault, so my apologies to you for any errors!)

***

Day 3 of PTLC kicked off with Andrej Stopar and his study on Slovenian speakers of English and their perception of four vowels, one of which was the "pretzel" (loved it!) vowel /æ/. Surprisingly (for my context, that is), his perception tasks rendered better results for /ʌ/ and /ɜ:/ over /e/ and /æ/.

Janice Wing Sze Wong discussed the results of her high variability phonetic training study on English vowels 1 and 2 with her Cantonese-speaking students. Her analysis was mostly acoustic, and based on formants 1 and 2, and on duration (which I thought highly relevant for this pair of vowels!).


Josefina Carrera-Sabaté, Imma CreusBellet and Clàudia Pons Mol presented a fantastic set of resources to learn Catalan: El Sons del Català and Guies de pronunciaciò del Català . They have done a great job with the websites, which have really enticed me to start learning Català!

Pavel Trofimovich, Sara Kennedy and Josée Blanchet presented a truly inspiring paper on speech ratings on fluency, comprehensibility and accentedness for learners of French as L2. I have been Googling their research papers, as they have done really interesting work on interlanguage issues in terms of phonology and phonological awareness, among other things. They have made some thoughtprovoking observations regarding the segmental, suprasegmental and fluency aspects that may have affected the raters' assessment of their samples of learner speech: accentedness ratings were lower when intonation choices were accurate and pitch range narrower; and the same features had a positive effect on fluency and comprehensibility, added to longer speech-runs and fewer hesitations. I would personally be interested in replicating this study in my context, somehow.

Shinichi Tokuma and Won Tokuma brought the conference to a close with a very interesting study on the perception of /p, b/ and robustness in terms of babble noise for Japanese learners of English. Among other things, they have found that improved L2 perception in their subjects was inversely related to the signal-to-noise ratio of the stimuli, and that /p/ was more robust to noise in all their experimental conditions.

We had a great "bonus track" session, right after lunch, with Nobuaki Minematsu from the University of Tokyo. He delivered a fantastic presentation on World Englishes and intelligibility. His talk discussed the basic difficulties we may encounter when trying to grasp the complex idea of what mutual intelligiblity really is and entails, especially in terms of its diversity. His ongoing project is aimed at finding a way of measuring intelligibility objectively (via matrixes and a few really complex ways entirely beyond my engineering-blind mind!) and somehow predicting possible intelligibility problems between speakers of different L1s communicating in English, based on a collection of misunderstandings and miscommunication. It was an excellent conference close.


A huge "Thank you!" to the organisers for a fantastic and welcoming conference. I felt at home at the lovely Chandler House at UCL and I hope I can stay in touch with all the wonderful people I have met, or encountered once again after 5 years. I am really grateful.

***

As I mentioned earlier for my experience at IPrA, it is a real blessing to be able to attend and take active part in these international events every now and then. The networking is incredible, and the whole conferencing thing is a fascinating learning and mind-opening experience. As I always say, if the world does not come to you, you should "go to the world". At times your local context, however great, cannot provide you with the learning experiences you need, so salary and life-permitting, I will try to continue furthering my learning paths in my beloved Buenos Aires, and abroad, and sharing all my experiences with you.


Hope you have enjoyed my attempt to bring the world to you, wherever you are reading this from!

Report on the Phonetics Teaching and Learning Conference (#PTLC2015) at UCL. August 5-7th, 2015 - Part 2

My previous post briefly commented on the sessions I attended at PTLC 2015 on Day 1. I am now going to report on a very busy day at the conference, Day 2, before it all flies away from my short-term memory and all my teaching duties take over! 

(My usual disclaimer: all misinterpretations of the presentations are my own, and totally unintentional)

Day 2: August 6th

The opening plenary was by Dr. Eleanor Lawson, who struck me as sooo knowledgeable and so young! She made a fascinating report of a few studies on Scottish postvocalic /r/, and what different types of measurements (impressionistic, MRI, UTI) contributed to the study of coarticulation. The presentation continued with the description of the whole development process for these two amazing online resources: Seeing Speech and Dynamic Dialects. It was, simply, an amazing presentation.

And after that, we had the fabulous experience of trying ultrasound imaging on our own tongues! 

Trying my Spanish alveolar trill! :D Sooo exciting!

The second session of the day started with a very entertaining presentation of teaching ideas for laboratory phonetics by Timothy Mills, Karen Pollock and Benjamin V. Tucker from the University of Alberta. One of their techniques involved getting students to create their own "Frankeintracts" of the vocal tract, making use of any material of their choice (apparently some students even attempted models that could actually utter sounds!). Other very interesting activities consisted in the students' plotting of their own vowel formants and a few designs of tests for the perception of neutralisation of items such as "latter/ladder". 

Mercedes Cabrera-Abreu and Francisco Vizcaíno-Ortega were up next (represented by Mercedes on this ocassion), and their presentation was a discussion of their classroom assessment tasks for their courses on acoustics, and the results obtained. From spectogram and waveform recognition tasks to the actual hand-drawing of spectograms, students were assessed on numerous aspects of acoustic phonetics, with different levels of success. I found the tasks particularly interesting (and difficult, given my really basic knowledge of acoustics!), and this presentation opened my mind to a other ways of testing.

I, Marina Cantarutti, was the following presenter. I discussed a very humble classroom experience on intonation teaching through speech genres (the lecture genre, in this case) and on my students' treatment of tonality, tonicity and tone in connection to thematic structure in a pre- and post-instruction tests. I have basically found that my students actively assigned different degrees of relevance to the various thematic elements in the text given by either conflating Themes and Rhemes in the same IP (lowering the relevance and possible contrastive value of the thematic element) or by treating them obliquely. I also made a point that contrary to my own expectations, students initially produced more cases of transfer from Spanish in terms of their treatment of focus, rather than of tone.

After lunch, two attempts at a group picture, and a tour round the labs and the library, we were all ready for more.

The whole #PTLC2015 bunch! (Credits: PTLC, FB page)

Smiljana Komar from the University of Ljubliana introduced her results in perception tasks for the fall-rise tone. She found some interesting cases of mistaken perception of fall-rises for falls, and then for rises. Her findings in a way appear pretty similar to the ones I believe we would find over here in Buenos Aires, if we tried the same tests, which makes the whole thing really intriguing, given that we have different L1s!

Yusuke Shibata, Masaki Taniguchi and Tamikazu Date presented an experience with junior high teacher and students, connected to notions of tonicity and focus. They have found these features to be highly teachable, and they expect to be able to "persuade" and also train teachers towards the active integration of pronunciation and intonation work at schools.

Junko Sugimoto and Yoko Uchida carried out an analysis of the government-approved ELT books in Japan in search of pronunciation tasks and training. They have found that there were activities connected to vowels, consonants and well as articulatory explanations and resources on phonics and Katakana. In my opinion, the books they analysed presented a number of very interesting contents and tasks, and they far exceeded the number of activities and pronunciation training available in the EFL textbooks that we have on this side of the world.

Nikola Paillereau presented a comparison between some specific Czech and French vowels as produced by students acquiring French as L2. The focus on this presentation was the assessment of L2 vowels using a piece of software called VisuVo -which, unfortunately, is not open to the public yet-, which was designed by the presenter and a collaborator . The program allowed for measurement and plotting of vowel formats and comparison of other variables across speakers and in an intra-speaker manner. 

Rungpat Roengpitya discussed the design of different Phonetics courses at different departments at her university in Thailand. I found it particularly interesting that the inclusion of Phonetics for training in some medical sciences, such as Dentistry, was aimed at helping the future professionals become aware of how they can improve a patient's quality of life by knowing how their intervention may affect speech.

Pekka Lintunen and Aleksi Mäkilähde (represented by the former on this occasion) carried out a very interesting study regarding what students prefer, like and find motivating about the Phonetics courses they attended. Their survey revealed that students find accents and intonation topics more engaging than other themes in the course. Part of their study also assessed whether students' view of Phonetics as highly benefitial to their future career had changed, and in most cases, students agreed that Phonetics was necessary for their professional development. There were a few caveats and self-objections that the presenter made to the survey and its delivery, but it was overall a very interesting, and easily replicable study, worth further thought!

The closing prenary was by Professor David Deterding, and it was aimed at discussing misunderstandings and the role of pronunciation for intelligibility. We participants had a lot of fun decoding many instances of English as an L2/FL speech from different locations (Brunei, Nigeria, among a few others), and in the end, it turned pretty challenging to make sense of many words. (This may seem quite obvious and ordinary for people teaching in multilingual environments, but in my teaching setting, where most of my students' L1 is Spanish and where English is only used in the classroom, activities like these really open up your mind!) . Deterding's talk included a review of the Lingua Franca Core, and some comments regarding attempts at revised versions in different environments. Apart from the well-known objection to stress-timed rhythm as a feature making speech less intelligible from an international perspective, there were a few comments regarding the role of consonant clusters in the blurring of comprehension at word level. Event though David did not perhaps tackle upon this explicitly in his talk, later personal communication made it clear that of course, we need to make a distinction between aims we may have regarding perception, and those for production. We all agree that perception and exposure to all accents of English, including "international Englishes" is essential if we want our language teaching training to be enabling and empowering for communication.

***

This is the end of Day 2 (because, of course, I will not report on the wine-tasting session!). Just in case: I'm just the messenger here, so I am merely reporting on the sessions, and adding a few comments, but of course, any objections or remarks on the presentations should be addressed to the authors themselves (do note that I have, in most cases, added links to the speakers' institutional affiliations!).

 I'll be wrapping up my discussion of PTLC on my next post on Day 3, which will probably be out during the weekend. Thanks for bearing with me!

Report on the Phonetics Teaching and Learning Conference (#PTLC2015) at UCL. August 5-7th, 2015 - Part 1

I have just attended another fabulous conference, this time, on the teaching and learning of Phonetics at University College London. I was also blessed with the opportunity of presenting my own paper! PTLC takes place every two years, and as with other conferences the papers submitted are subjected to blind review by the academic commitee (hopefully the proceedings will be published soon!). In the meantime, you can read about the conference and check previous proceedings here.

In this post, I will be talking about some of the presentations I would like to comment on (as usual, any misinterpretations are my own). If you want to get a deferred "feel" of what the conference was like, you may want to see the Storify collection of live- tweets that Jane Setter put together (scroll to the very bottom of this post - and yes, there was some hectic tweeeting!)

This first post is on Day 1. 

Day 1: August 5th

The conference kicked off with University of Reading's Jane Setter's presentation of her "flipped learning" experience in her Phonetics courses at graduate and undergraduate levels. This methodology basically consists in making the most of class-time for practical and problem-solving tasks while assigning videotaped lectures and practical tasks with key as homework. There were some interesting references to the well-known Bloom's taxonomy, and also to Dale's 1969Cone of Experience, a thought-provoking approach to types of learning tasks that may contribute to the increase of retention types. Jane discussed the results of her assessment tasks with the flipped and "unflipped" (?) classes, with a marked improvement for students in the former, except for the dictation tasks. (Dictations and decoding tasks are always a problem, if you ask me! This does deserve a whole new post!)

Shawn Nissen from Brigham Young University also reported on a blended learning experience with large Phonetics classes (for Speech Therapy trainees, if I remember correctly) consisting of, among other things, lots of self-paced theoretical and practical tasks with key, leading to online assessment tasks (of which an 80% success grade should be achieved). I found it particularly interesting, and challenging as well, that many of the materials for decoding included audio files containing noise levels, and also disordered speech. There were also some true and realistic remarks worth recalling, such as the fact that Phonetics teaching needs to be orderly and it needs a "unique learning environment"and set of techniques we may not find when teaching other subjects.

Alice Yin Wa Chan introduced some of her own ideas to bring variety into the Phonetics classroom, including the use of water bottles as an analogy to draw students' awareness of the cavities, shapes, amplification in the vocal tract. She also found ways of connecting students' cultural practices (like the use of acronyms to describe their relationship status) to minimal pairs, and a reference to Peter Roach's comparison of allophones to different styles in handwriting.

Gwen Brekelmans discussed the results of her study on a group of Dutch learners of English at University and compared the effects of lack of explicit pronunciation instruction in two groups, one group of learners who had taken their "year abroad" experience, and others who had instruction for two years but were not trained during their third year. Once instruction had stopped for the second group of learners, subjects showed a clear deterioration of their foreign accent, especially in vowels. Those students spending a year abroad did show a bit more improvement. In all cases it was found that pronunciation of English as an L2 did not remain fully stable after instruction (which is exactly what happens with many of my teacher trainees once they graduate, sadly. Lots of pondering to do in this respect. It is definitely something worth giving a thought...)

Eva Estebas made a truly interesting presentation (fitting timely and perfectly with my current personal interests!) on an adaptation of ToBI and the School of London's nuclear configurations to teach intonation and help learners work autonomously at a graduate distance programme (big challenge, if you ask me!). Eva called this special concoction "TL_ToBI" (Tone and Break Indices for Teaching and Learning), and I would say she collected the best of both approaches, focusing on the connections between metrical and tonal structure, and the notation and visual aids for ToBI, and the tune description and nuclear configurations of the British School. Estebas reported an improvement in students' perception and production of English Intonation after employing this new approach.

***

Here ends my Day 1 report on PTLC. More on this great conference coming up soon!

In the meantime, take a peek at this wonderful collection of tweets!

Report on the panel "Prosodic Constructions of Dialog", at the 14th International Pragmatics Conference - Part 2

In my previous post, I reported the first two sessions of the panel "Prosodic Constructions of Dialog" at the International Pragmatics Conference. Here's the second and final part of this "racconto".

Session 3: Prosodic Constructions and Actions

Beatrice Szczepek-Reed discussed the case of the German version of "yes, but"- " ja aber" as a tactic or strategy, and its different phonetic manifestations in interaction, which appear to project different affiliative stances. As second pair parts, they may be realised in a continuum going from "ja aber", with the first element comprising a first TCU and the second element carrying a pitch accent and  lengthening; to " jaber", compressed, with the presence of glottalisation (also for some of the tokens in the first group, btw).  "Ja aber" was found to express disaffiliation through disagreement or qualification, whereas "jaber" "re-does" disffiliation, as either previous rejection or a lack of uptake. There was a very interesting remark about the role of the "pre-front field " (Auer, 1996), the first position at the beginning of a TCU, which is the locus for new "creations" in language and the conversion of many items into discourse markers (this leads me back to the presentation on Pragmatic Markers by Romero-Trillo on the " Pragma-Discourse..." on Monday, and the role of continuers as interpersonal and textual markers, as seen by SFL). I found Beatrice's remark that "in order to study a big thing you have to work on a small thing" particularly inspiring!

The following presentation by Rasmus Persson surveyed different roles and prosodic constitutions of repetition in French, in particular, of other-repeats. The presenter reviewed some of the characteristics of French, especially in terms of stress, before discussing the two prosodic formats of the cases of other-repeats found in his data: early peak with a salient secondary accent, and a late rise fall, with a salient primary accent. Whereas the first configuration has been associated with the acknowledgment of receipt, "registering" previous talk, the second case was found to initiate repair, especially implicating some sort of "problem" with the content of the talk being repeated. The presenter wraps up his discussion by making a very important point for the study of phonetics in interaction: "the interactional function of prosody can be understood by taking into account the action the prosodic design contributes to, what a turn as a whole is supposed to do".

Maria Ibh Crone Aarestrup and Kerstin Fischer discussed an experiment on the way native and non-native speakers perceive greetings as produced by robots. The presenters reviewed some bibliography on the intonation of greetings, such as Wells (2006), Tench (1996) and then described the experience, which included synthetic productions of greetings produced by three different robots , which were then rated by native and non native speakers of English.  From what l have understood, native speakers found the high wide falling tone on greetings more inviting, which was, to me, at least, expected, though the presenters, were apparently expecting those with a rise to do the trick. But then, it may be a misunderstanding on my part.

The discussion session was really fruitful, with comments on the notion of prosodic " constructions" as actual processes unfolding in time, fluid and flexible, vs the perhaps "rigid" association that could be wrongly made with the term. There was also another true remark about the fact that when it comes to the analysis of the enactment of actions through prosodic constructions, there is always ambiguity and gradience to be wary of.

Session 4: Prosodic Constructions and Gesture

David House reported on a number of experiments carried out with Margaret Zellers to see connections between gesture and prosody. The audience had fun watching the videos of the interactants looking like "ants" with their antennae and a few other props recording the speakers' every move. The presenter reviewed a few of the already-identified relationships between prosody and co-speech features, such as prominence marking, phrase connection and demarcation, dialogue regulation and turn-taking, and reported that in English, it is the intonational cue that prevails. This study was concerned with turn boundaries, and some of the findings were that turn-holding practices show lengthening of both prosodic features and gesture, and in the case of turn-yielding boundaries, the end of gesture precedes the end of talk spurt before transition. This was corroborated manually and through automatic methods, but not yet tested for statistical significance.

Romero-Lopes, Del Re and Dodane (represented by the latter), discuss their findings regarding prosody, gesture and the acquisition in infancy of the Brazilian "preterito perfeito simple" tense. They found that sound lengthening and gestures were synchronised when the conjugated verb was produced. (I may not have been faithful to their results, I am afraid, so my apologies for any misinterpretation).

The final presentation was by Richard Ogden and Verónica González-Temer, on the particle "mm" in Chilean Spanish, and it was aimed at exploring its function and different vocal and non-vocal modalities. The data was very interesting, as it consisted of elicited situations where speakers were asked to taste food they had never had before, and interact with another person to reach an agreement on the rating and possible ingredients of what they have just tried. The tokens were coded according to the taxonomy by Gardner (2001) and classified in terms of action types. The presenters have found that as response tokens, "mm" was uttered with low falls, glottal stops, nods and quite short in length. Non-response tokens showed greater degrees of variation (especially in terms of gesture) depending on whether they were enacting incipient speakership, gustatory or lapse terminator actions.

The final discussion was as enriching as for the previous sessions, including the acknowledgement that there are different semiotic systems interacting in a parallel fashion, that gesture should be part of the analysis, and that it makes sense to see how participants themselves make sense of the prosodic constructions themselves. This, of course, marks a break from other linguistic traditions, as it drives the focus away from what is normative, into what is descriptive.

I hope I have delivered a faithful account of the sessions of this fantastic panel, and my apologies for any misinterpretation and typos (wrote this post at the airport!). It's been a true blessing for me to have attended it.