A) Main topic: Coarticulation and instrumental physiological techniques
During speech vocal tract is under constant influence of more than one speech segment, which causes articulatory gestures to overlap in time creating processes which are usually referred to as coarticulation. What exactly is coarticulated, i.e. what is the basic unit of speech production, and which aspects of coarticulatory processes are biomechanically universal vs linguistically specific is still largely unknown. Great leaps in knowledge have been made during last few decades through the development of instrumental physiological techniques, which enabled us to improve our understanding of the relationship between coarticulation processes and speech motor control.
The relevance of the topic of coarticulation prompted us to highlight it as the main topic of the 10th Speech research.
This topic includes, but it is not exhausted by the following:
- acceptable variability of all aspects of speech sound production
- speech production variability and speech acquisition
- variability in typical and atypical speech
- variability of speech perception
- coarticulatory direction and
- coarticulation and prosody
- coarticulation and gender
- coarticulation and age
- coarticulation processes and speech production variability in different languages
B) General phonetic topics and orthoepy as highlighted topic
Topics from all areas of phonetic and speech sciences are equally welcome, with orthoepy being highlighted. Orthoepy is the study of a spoken norm of a certain language, i.e. pronunciation and prosodic norms. A panel discussion will be organized, which will cover the topics of consistency, representation, systematic processes and suitability of orthoepic norms. Problems in standardizing accents and different approaches to tackling those challenges in Croatian, Serbian, Slovene and Bosnian orthoepy will also be discussed at the panel.
