Special & Satellite Sessions

Chairs: Anna Balas, Katarzyna Dziubalska-Koaczyk, Magdalena Wrembel

This special session explores how moving beyond L2 speech enriches our understanding of speech acquisition and processing. Research on the phonological acquisition of third and additional languages (L3/Ln) points to enhanced perceptual sensitivity, increased (meta)phonological awareness, and complex patterns of cross-linguistic influence. At the same time, it raises novel methodological and theoretical challenges, as many existing models do not adequately account for interactions among multiple phonological systems. We welcome contributions on multilingual speech production, perception, and processing, including segmental and suprasegmental features, L2 vs. L3 comparisons, and exploratory theoretical frameworks.

Chairs: Anton Malmi, Claire Nance 

Child acquisition of speech requires developing the cognitive categories for phonology and also the fine-grained movements needed for speech production. Despite decades of research documenting phonological acquisition, comparatively much less is known about how children acquire the physical mechanisms of speech, and how this process interacts with bilingualism and multilingualism. This special session leverages the contribution of child articulation as an intersection between theoretical, clinical, and technical phonetics. We welcome contributions on topics such as first language acquisition of articulation, multilingual articulation, infant articulation, motor control, clinical articulation, normative articulatory data, biofeedback, methodological innovation, computational modelling of child articulation, coarticulation.

Chairs: Shelece Easterday, Maida Percival

While occurring in only about 8.5% of the world’s spoken languages (Moran & McCloy 2019), ejective consonants are found in languages in a wide variety of regions, families, and language vitality contexts. This session seeks to showcase the diverse and innovative ways in which the phonetics of ejectives are currently being studied. We especially invite studies which incorporate the following: novel instrumental methods for studying ejectives, including articulatory methods; the utilization of data from corpora of language-in-use; and studies developed within the context of community-engaged documentation, description, and revitalization.

Chairs: Sónia Frota, Aude Noiray, Marina Vigário

In a growing body of research, infant speech perception has been argued to involve sensorimotor constraints. However, there remain important gaps in our understanding of the underpinnings of the perception-production link in (a)typical development, how it might be strengthened with infants’ upcoming experience with speech production, whether it might be delayed/deviant in atypical development, and what aspects may be language-independent or language-specific. This special session aims to gather new insights into the development of the perception-production link across different languages, contexts, and populations of infants, including clinical populations with auditory, visual, motor, and/or language difficulties.

Chairs: Míša Hejná and Joshua Penney 

Vocal variation has been studied using many methods. Although laryngeal endoscopy is a valuable tool, it remains underused in phonetics compared with other techniques, partly because of limited accessible expertise. A special session is therefore appropriate, as it brings together linked contributions around a shared theme. This session aims to bridge clinical and experimental phonetics by presenting interdisciplinary work on the use of endoscopy. It will provide practical guidance for establishing endoscopy in research settings and for analysing endoscopic data across phonetic fields, while promoting discussion on preserving and expanding endoscopic knowledge for future phoneticians. Four papers are already planned for this session

Chair: Yi Xu

How speech production and perception are linked to each other is a long-standing puzzle still without a satisfactory solution. Much of the assumed difficulty comes from observed variability in production, which may hinder the mapping of articulated sounds onto perceived linguistic units. An underexplored perspective is how children solve the mapping problem in acquisition, despite being more disadvantaged than adults. Might the learning mechanisms involved in acquisition include solutions to the mismatch problem? This special session invites contributions from behavioural as well as computational studies that explore whether and how the production-perception link can be established through learning.

Chairs: Jürgen Trouvain and Richard Ogden

Speech respiration research is relatively rare and often restricted to read speech, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of phonetic forms, variability, and inhalation placement in spoken interaction. This special session explores how breathing and speaking intertwine, examining how speakers coordinate respiration for turn-taking, repairs, gaps and pauses, affect, and interpersonal convergence. We welcome submissions with a focus on data that allows for both interactional, kinematic and acoustic phenomena to be observed, and an interactionally informed understanding of how breathing and speaking in conversation are intertwined.

Chairs: Melissa Redford, Amelie Richard

Speech reflects the influence of domain-general systems — neural, behavioral, sensory, affective, and social — whose interactions are shaped by development, experience, and communication context. Understanding speech requires conceptual framing and empirical tools that engage these systems together, since each approach reveals structure that others cannot capture. This session brings together researchers studying domain-general effects on speech from complementary vantage points: neural encoding and dynamics, motor simulation and inner speech, somatosensory-auditory feedback, and affective and social context. The session privileges perspectives tracking how system interactions change, stabilize, or break down to distinguish influences that are intrinsic to the system from those that are externally shaping.

Chairs: Volker Dellwo, Daniel Friedrichs, Andrea Fröhlich, Sarah Lim, Hanna Ruch, Elisa Pellegrino

This special session asks how synthetic speech can be used as a tool for phonetic research on voice identity, speaker individuality, and intelligibility. Voice cloning, voice conversion, resynthesis, and anonymisation make it possible to manipulate dimensions of speech that are normally intertwined in natural recordings, including voice quality, prosody, linguistic content, accent, speaking style, and channel. We welcome contributions that use synthetic or transformed speech to examine which phonetic cues make voices recognisable, intelligible, comparable, or evidentially useful, and how such cues are handled by listeners, forensic practitioners, and automatic systems. Relevant work may include perception, acoustic phonetics, sociophonetics, forensic phonetics, speaker recognition, deepfake detection, and responsible use of identifiable voice data.

Chairs: Oliver Niebuhr, Marzena Zygis

Human communication relies on multiple modalities that jointly convey meaning and support interaction. Yet communication often occurs under non-ideal conditions, where channels are degraded, absent, technologically transformed, or replaced, as in noise, remote communication, sign language, clinical conditions, or interactions with avatars and socially interactive AI. We invite contributions on multimodal communication involving speech, gesture, gaze, facial expression, sign language, and written–spoken interaction. Topics include adverse conditions, avatar-mediated communication, and communication in underrepresented populations, including clinical groups, blind and/or deaf speakers, individuals with dementia, second-language speakers, and multilingual communities, with particular attention to how communicative functions are reorganized when channels are constrained, altered, or transformed.

Chairs: Bryan Gick, Connor Mayer

Human language engages some of nature’s most complex movement systems. Grounding theories of language in biologically plausible accounts of how bodies move can provide valuable insights into language, while understanding language from this perspective provides valuable insights into the human movement sciences. Embodying phonetics will require working together across a wide range of disciplines to reconceptualize many aspects of linguistic movement: differentiation/fractionation and modularization of movement systems, including development, learning and rehabilitation; the role of the postural substrate; interaction between neural control, neuromuscular organization, and biomechanics; conceptualizing social-communicative task space and feedback systems; and so on. This special session invites submissions from researchers in any area of phonetic science relating to this effort.