The heat is on this summer - you need SPF!

The 2024 annual Summer Phonetics - Phonology Forum (SPF) took place on August 7th, and now we know why they call it SPF!

UofT linguists, attendees and presenters alike, gathered for the reception, presentations, and lunch held at the Linguistics Lounge, pictured below.

Session 1, chaired by Professor Alexei Kochetov, saw presentations by both faculty and graduate students.

Louis Careri, Laura Griffin, Youmna Mohamed, Jemi Samuel, Avery Ozburn

Developing a model for community engagement in phonetics and phonology fieldwork

Louis Careri describes p-sided
challenges associated with fieldwork

Laura Griffin's YouTube Shorts Sample, a
language learning resource targeted towards the
younger generation of Mbembe speakers.

Yanfei Lu, 2024 Elan Dresher Prize winner  (see Elan below)

New approaches to stress patterns of Oneida 

Professor Yoonjung Kang chaired Session 2, seeing the following presentations:

Jessica Yeung

Where to go from here? Directionality and morphological structure in vowel harmony

Liam McFadden, Shana Rosenberg, Gianna Giovio Canavesi, Avery Ozburn

An artificial language learning experiment on rounding harmony target asymmetries

Lunch was held at Sidney Smith in the Linguistics Lounge.

Session 3, chaired by presenter and Professor Avery Ozburn, showcased two projects.

Jack Mahlmann

Can you hear the silence? Perceptual learning of plain-ejective contrast

 

B. Elan Dresher, namesake and founder of the prize of the same name (see Yanfei above)

Features and contrast: The universal versus the language particular 

Session 4 was chaired by Jessamyn Schertz, Professor of Language Studies at UTM.

Laura Escobar

Gender differences in f0, intonation and particle use in conversation and performative speech in Japanese

Derek Denis, Lauren Bigelow

Speech rhythm, stance, and sociolinguistic identity: Two case studies from Ontario Englishes

Session 5 was chaired by Professor Nathan Sanders, and saw the following presentations, followed by closing remarks.

Alessandro Jaker (Sisseton Wahpeton College)

How natural is tonal phonology? What happens to stress-tone interactions when tones reverse

Laura Griffin

Tonal alternations in Mwaghavul associative constructions

 

 

Closing remarks were brief! Thanks to everyone for participating and organizing!

WHITL and the Forum's organizers, Samuel Akinbo, Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, Philip Monahan, Avery Ozburn, Nathan Sanders, and Jessamyn Schertz, have much to be proud of, and much to look forward to next year!