Plenary speakers
Ocke-Schwen Bohn (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Dr. Ocke-Schwen Bohn is the professor of English Linguistics at Aarhus University, Denmark. He received his PhD from Kiel University (Germany) and spent his time as a post-doc working with James Flege at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. With funding from German and Danish research agencies, and in collaboration with American, Canadian, and Australian colleagues, Bohn’s research focuses on the causes and characteristics of foreign accented speech, and on speech perception (in infants and in seniors, cross-language, and in second language acquisition).
Title of the talk: The revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r): How and why it differs from the original SLM, and what has stood the test of time. (ABSTRACT)
Annie Tremblay (University of Kansas, US)
Dr. Annie Tremblay is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kansas. She obtained her PhD in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Hawaii in 2007, and has been at the University of Kansas since 2012. Her research focuses on second-language speech perception and spoken word recognition, with focus on the processing of prosody, lexical stress, and other suprasegmental phenomena. Her most recent research, funded by the National Science Foundation, investigates whether the cue-weighting theory of speech perception can provide a strong theoretical framework for understanding the listening difficulties that second-language learners encounter with lexical stress, and for developing training stimuli and methods to enhance the perceptual learning of lexical stress.
Title of the talk: Elucidating the Scope of L1-to-L2 Cue-Weighting Transfer in Speech Perception and Spoken Word Recognition. (ABSTRACT)
Pilar Prieto (ICREA - Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalonia)
Dr. Pilar Prieto is an ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalunya.
Her research focuses on the communicative role of prosody and gesture in language, as well as their significance in language development and learning.
She currently serves as associate editor of the journals Language and Speech and Frontiers in Communication.
Title of the talk: How the prosody in our hands and body helps us learn second language pronunciation. Empirical evidence for the benefits of embodied trainings in the classroom. (ABSTRACT)