Paul Boersma
How acquiring a bidirectional grammar restricts variation
University of Amsterdam
Paul Boersma received an MSc in physics from the University of Nijmegen in 1988 and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Amsterdam in 1998. Since 2005 he has been Professor of Phonetic Sciences at the University of Amsterdam.
His research focuses on modelling and simulating the acquisition, evolution and typology of the production and comprehension of phonology and phonetics. For this he developed a bidirectional model of phonology and phonetics (BiPhon) in which the speaker and listener travel the same morphological, phonological and phonetic levels of representation, which are connected by symmetric constraints that are weighted or ranked, or by symmetric neural network connections.
His further research involves the history of the Franconian tone systems. Boersma is also the designer and main author (with David Weenink) of Praat, the world’s most used computer program for the analysis and manipulation of speech.
Ghada Khattab
Accent variation and language processing: a tug-of-war between efficiency and social justice
Newcastle University
Ghada Khattab is a Professor in Phonetics at Newcastle University, UK where she has been working since she completed her PhD in Linguistics at Leeds University in 2003. Her main areas of expertise are Arabic phonetics and phonology, bilingual phonological acquisition, and sociolinguistics. Her research explores how languages are acquired, stored, and produced within a social context. It spans adult and child phonology and has contributed new knowledge and theoretical advances in those fields, as well as having direct impact within clinical spheres. She has published widely in these areas and her research has attracted funding from major research councils and other funding bodies in the UK, Northern Europe and the Arab world. She is currently head of the Experimental Linguistics Lab and Phonetics Research Group at Newcastle and supervises several research students who work in areas that are at the intersection between speech production and perception, bilingualism and second language learning, and language variation and change.
Daniel Recasens
From experimental phonetics to sound change: vocalization and deletion of syllable-final dark /l/ in Middle English and Early Romance
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Daniel Recasens is emeritus professor at the Departament of Catalan Philology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and was director of the phonetics lab of the Institute of Catalan Studies between 1990 and 2022. He holds a PhD in Linguistics form the University of Connecticut (1983) and has acted as Chair of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Barcelona, 2003) and as Vicepresident of the International Phonetic Association (2007-2011). He has published numerous papers and books on speech production and sound change among which Coarticulation and Sound Change in Romance (2014, John Benjamins), The Production of Consonant Clusters. Implications for Phonology and Sound Change (2018, De Gruyter) and Phonetic Causes of Sound Change: The Palatalization and Assibilation of Obstruents (2020, Oxford University Press).