These activities now form part of the theme “Theory – Processing and units of representation”, newly structured as a cross-cutting topic. The goal is to reinforce connections between phonological modeling, and empirical and typological approaches. This cross-cutting theme aims to explain and model speech patterns by relating them both to linguistic structures and to independent principles, as well as to social context, populations, and cultures.
Our group’s research goes beyond the emergence of features and segments to investigate other units of speech, and at structured and unstructured variation. We also look at the production-perception link in relation to processes such as acquisition and sound change (both within individuals and communities).
Every member of the team contributes, and we study these topics across languages that are highly diverse typologically and geographically (in conjunction with Typology: phonetics, phonology, and interfaces). We examine under-studied phenomena such as voice, atypical speech, and aging (in conjunction with Clinical phonetics and atypical voice and speech). By studying the acquisition of speech sounds by children and adults in monolingual and multilingual settings, we investigate the malleability of sound systems as well as speakers’ plasticity (in conjunction with Acquisition and multilingualism). To conduct these studies, we create longitudinal and synchronic corpora in ecologically-valid or experimental settings (in conjunction with Methods: Corpora, analysis tools, experimental and computational approaches).