html website templates



New Sounds 2019

Keynote Speakers

Prof. Valerie Shafer (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

BIOGRAPHY:
Valerie L Shafer is Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences and Associate Director of the M.S. Program in Cognitive Neuroscience at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research focuses on first and second language development, with a particular focus on speech perception, in typical and atypical populations using behavioral and neurophysiological methods.

TITLE OF HER KEYNOTE TALK:
Neural evidence for how experience shapes speech processing in first and second language acquisition

ABSTRACT:
The last 20 or so years have led to a gradually-increasing number of neurophysiological studies focused on speech processing. Even so, the total number of studies, particularly those examining development of speech processing, is relatively small, when compared to the many studies focused on non-speech auditory stimuli. One goal of this talk is to advocate for more investigations of speech processing using these measures. The overarching goal of our laboratory has been to understand the neural mechanisms that underlie speech perception and to explain how speech experience shapes these underlying processes in first and second language learning. Our lab has contributed substantially to the existing knowledge on neural indices of speech. In this talk, I will illustrate the distinct contribution of neural information to our understanding of first and second language development. Several useful neurophysiological designs will be described. I then will present results from a range of studies, both completed and in progress, that are helping to build a picture of the underlying neural processes that support speech development in monolingual and bilingual children and in early and late second language learners. This “picture” indicates a hierarchical model, but with some parallel activation leading from encoding of information in auditory cortex to conscious awareness and perception. I will demonstrate that investigations of both first and second language speech processing give us insight into the general nature of how we process spoken language. 

Prof. Pavel Trofimovich (Concordia University)

BIOGRAPHY:
Pavel Trofimovich is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His research focuses on cognitive and social aspects of second language processing and learning and the acquisition of second language pronunciation and speaking skills by children and adults. He currently serves as Journal Editor of Language Learning.

TITLE OF HIS KEYNOTE TALK:
Exploring a new research agenda for second language speech learning

ABSTRACT:
In New Sounds’ nearly 30-year history, beginning from the first meeting at the Unversity of Amsterdam in 1990, the conference has become a major international event for researchers and practitioners interested in various aspects of speech learning and use. The conference now encompasses rich strands of theoretical and applied research, including (not not limited to) speech perception and production, phonetics and phonoogy, technology, multilingualism, learning of second and additional language, as well as various methodological approaches to the study of speech learning and use. A 30-year conference anniversary is an important milestone, requiring both a look back to evaluate what has been accomplished as well as a look towards the future to identify exciting new research trends. In this presentation, I will take stock of several conceptual and methodological achievements by second language speech researchers in the past three decades. I will then turn to the future and provide a personal view of possible new (or rediscovered old) agendas for second language speech learning, highlighting the dynamic, variable, multifaceted, and multimodal nature of speech learning and use. Above all, I will highlight the importance of socially relevant research practices which are useful to the daily lives of language speakers.

Dr. Reiko Yamada (ATR)

BIOGRAPHY:
Reiko Akahane-Yamada, Ph.D. is a principal researcher at ATR, representative director & CTO at ATR Learning Technology Corporation, and an adjunct professor at Kobe University. Her main research field is second language speech learning, and she is currently developing English educational apps and services.

TITLE OF HER KEYNOTE TALK:
L2 speech perception, production and learning: What laboratory training studies have told us

ABSTRACT:
Cross-linguistic studies have shown that certain phonetic contrasts are extremely difficult to learn for speakers of some specific languages. However, training studies have demonstrated that laboratory training can improve the ability of adults to perceive and produce such difficult contrasts. For a typical example, studies that examined the perception and production of English /r/-/l/ by native speakers of Japanese are introduced in this paper. In the 1990s, a collaborative team made up of researchers from Indiana University and ATR reported that when native speakers of Japanese were trained on /r/-/l/ minimal pairs using an identification task with natural tokens, accuracy in perception significantly improved from pre-test to post-test, and the training effects were generalized to include novel speakers and novel words. After this paper, a series of training studies was conducted and additional results were obtained. Interestingly, all such results suggested the importance of phoneme acquisition in learning a new language. In order to conduct production training experiments, a technique to recognize and evaluate foreign accented speech was also developed. The theoretical and technological implications for effective foreign language learning methods will be discussed, and an application development utilizing these findings will be also introduced.