Wednesday 30 November 2011

International Dissemination of Research

Research on comparing vowel formant normalisation procedures, to feature as a chapter in Nicholas's forthcoming PhD dissertation, has now (as of November 2011) been presented at two major international conferences, and formed a part of workshops given on sociophonetics by Anne Fabricius, Tyler Kendall and Dominic Watt.

In August 2011, Nicholas gave an oral presentation at the 14th Methods in Dialectology conference in London ON (Canada) which was well-received. Several conference delegates who had not attended the talk requested the accompanying handout in the days following the talk.

Also in August 2011, Nicholas attended the 17th International Congress in Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Hong Kong. Nicholas gave a poster presentation, co-authored with Paul Foulkes of the University of York. The poster attracted delegates from many different countries and universities, many of whom had comments and questions about the research.

In November 2011, Nicholas was invited to collaborate with Anne Fabricius of Roskilde University (Denmark), Tyler Kendall of the University of Oregon (USA), and Dominic Watt of the University of York (UK), co-presenting at a workshop on sociophonetic methodology and normalisation at the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Language Change in Real Time (LANCHART) at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). Nicholas's research comparing vowel formant normalisation formed a part of the initial 2-hour presentation before the hands-on element of the workshop. Nicholas gave this part of the presentation himself. Attendees included students, postgraduate students, faculty members and members of the Copenhagen Sociolinguistics Circle.

Prior to this, Nicholas's research findings had been summarised by Anne Fabricius, Tyler Kendal and Dominic Watt in the sociophonetics workshops run at the LSA (Linguistic Society of America) Summer Institute 2011 at the University of Boulder, Colorado (USA), and at the University of York (UK) in September 2011.