The aims of the PAC programme (Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain: usages, variétés et structure - The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structure) can be summarized as follows: to give a better picture of spoken English in its unity and diversity (geographical, social and stylistic); to test existing theoretical models in phonology, phonetics and sociolinguistics from a synchronic and diachronic point of view, making room for the systematic study of variation; to favour communication between specialists in speech and in phonological theory; and to provide corpus-based data and analyses which will help improve the teaching of English as a foreign language. To learn more about us, you can visit the programme’s website: https://www.pacprogramme.net/?lang=en.
The 17th edition of the PAC international conference will focus on perception and representations of spoken English varieties, both native and non-native, from a phonetic and phonological point of view. People working in the framework of the PAC programme are used to following a field approach, which is production-oriented. We would like to broaden our perspective by using our data to test perception and representations. The idea is to open the conference to researchers specialized in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics as applied to phonetics and phonology. Indeed, the term perception can be understood in two senses.
First, perception is considered in a psycholinguistic sense here: we would be happy to welcome papers dealing with spoken word recognition in relation to allophonic variation for example (Luce at al., 2003; Ranbom & Connine, 2007; Connine et al., 2008, amongst others). Papers could also examine the processing of phonological contrasts, which may exist in a variety of English and not in another. When a word can be pronounced with two different phonemes, do speakers encode two forms as distinct lexical representations, even if they are associated to the same meaning (see Dufour et al., 2019 on French)? Does the answer depend on the exposure to several varieties (Sumner & Samuel, 2009)? Psycholinguistic perception protocols can also be used to better understand non-native speech. Among other issues, the following could be tackled: Do L2 learners use reconstruction processes to recognise reduced speech (Morano et al., 2023)? How does orthography affect L2 perception and phonological representations (Bassetti et al., 2021; Stoehr & Martin, 2022)? How do L2 learners perceive English prosodic patterns (Michelas et al., 2016)?
Second, the term perception leads us inevitably to question representations. Attitudinal perception studies such as surveys, interviews, or dialect questionnaires (Llamas, 2017) are often used when dealing with varieties. Other more indirect methods like the Implicit Association Test can also be helpful (McKenzie & Carrie, 2018) to try and answer the following, non-exhaustive questions: What can variation tell us about cognitive and social systems? What is the relationship between accent, identity and social attitudes? What are the natives’ attitudes towards foreign-accented speech (Pantos & Perkins, 2013)? Can adaptation for foreign-accented speech resemble perceptual learning for native accented speech (Bradlow & Bent, 2008)? How can sociolinguistic factors influence the way natives and non-natives perceive speech (Clopper & Bradlow, 2009)? Can it bias perception (Baquiran & Nicoladis, 2019)? Have attitudes to accents and representations changed over time (Sharma et al., 2022)? Can they change over the time course of an interaction (Levon et al., 2022)?
These are not exhaustive issues but only represent a small part of avenues of research that we would like to explore. We would be delighted to receive propositions dealing with related or different subjects that are not mentioned here.
The deadline for sending a title with a one-page anonymous abstract (excluding references) is November 20, 2024. Please visit the conference website, where you can find a template for abstracts and upload your submission: https://pac2025.sciencesconf.org/ (you will need to create a scienceconf account if you don’t already have one).
Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 13, 2025.
For any questions, you can contact us at the following address: pac2025@sciencesconf.org
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