Workshop

Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity

Thursday, July 31 to Saturday, August 2, 2008
Munich, Germany

Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity

Venue:
Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing (IPS),
Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany
Date:
Thursday, July 31 (start mid afternoon)
to Saturday, August 2, 2008 (end early evening)
Organizers:
Phil Hoole, Lasse Bombien, Marianne Pouplier (Munich)
Christine Mooshammer (Haskins)
Barbara Kühnert (Paris)
In the fields of phonetics, phonology and psycholinguistics there is currently a wealth of activity involving the analysis of complex sound sequences. Consonant clusters, whether occurring within individual lexical items, or emerging in running speech at word boundaries, give particularly striking evidence for the temporal complexity of human speech. The main aim of this workshop is to do justice to this complexity by bringing together researchers from a wide range of backgrounds, including speech production, speech perception, speech disorders, language typology, acquisition of first and second language, cognitive processes in lexical access.

Topics

  • gestural coordination in clusters
  • sources of universal vs. language-specific constraints
  • sonority hierarchy, syllable structure and syllable weight
  • voicing restrictions within clusters
  • assimilation within and across boundaries
  • the role of phonotactics for lexical access
  • simplifications in reduction forms
  • speech acquisition, speech disorders, repair mechanisms, and loanword adaptation
  • written language
  • tonal alignment and syllable structure

Invited speakers will include Donca Steriade, Tracy Hall, Andrea Weber, Jim Scobbie, Adam Buchwald, Pierre Hallé, Theo Vennemann, and there will be active participation from several projects of the German Science Foundation (DFG) Priority Programme # 1234 "Phonological and phonetic competence: between grammar, signal processing, and neural activity" as well as several Munich-based projects focussing on articulatory coordination.

The conference will consist of oral papers (30 minute slots for submitted papers) and poster presentations (no parallel sessions)

Further enquiries (if not answered by this web-site) can be sent to cluster@phonetik.uni-muenchen.de