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We are soliciting high-quality contributions on the topic of “Techniques and Methods for Investigating Speech Articulation” for a Special Issue of Laboratory Phonology.

Guest editors: Lorenzo Spreafico, Alessandro Vietti

Call for papers

Articulatory data are critical to our understanding of speech production, and investigating the vocal tract is a challenging task because the articulators differ widely in their anatomy (soft vs. hard articulators), physiology (fixed vs. mobile articulators), and accessibility (visible vs. non-visible articulators). Indeed, only a few methods are available for the simultaneous imaging of articulators and/or the tracking of their movements.

Recently, applied physics and biomedical engineering have revolutionized the way we record, visualize, and measure the function of some organs of the human body. However, most medical imaging technologies are not designed with the investigation of the speech organs in mind, and their significant potential to address fundamental questions about the nature of human speech sounds and sound systems remains underdeveloped.

Thus, this special issue of Laboratory Phonology aims to facilitate contact between researchers active in laboratory phonology and specialists in engineering, industrial, and clinical development in the area of speech imaging. The special issue will offer participants a platform to present new knowledge and findings regarding the acquisition, imaging, analysis, and modelling of visible and non-visible articulators in order to examine the organization and structure of speech from the perspective of laboratory phonology.

We invite contributions ranging from established and advanced practices to future technologies and methods, but, ideally, the focus should be on the real-time and deferred visualization of speech processes with minimal invasiveness.

All interested parties are encouraged to submit proposals, including researchers outside of the laboratory phonology community of scholars. Potential contributions include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Principles for the detection and estimation of the kinematics of speech articulators;
• Direct and indirect measuring devices for speech articulation and the vocal tract;
• Multi-modal measuring systems;
• Articulatory data processing, analysis, modelling, and integration and fusion;
• Design and management of articulatory corpora.

As a first step, contributors are asked to submit a 1-page abstract to the editors at email address alps@unibz.it. Contributions will be evaluated based on relevance for the topic of the special issue and overall quality and contribution to the field. Contributors are invited to mention in their abstracts and articles how their proposal is relevant to the themes of laboratory phonology. Contributors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full paper, which will undergo the standard peer review process. Contributions that do not fulfil the criteria for this special issue can, of course, still be submitted to Laboratory Phonology for review for a future issue of the journal.

Timeline
Deadline for submission of 1-page abstract: 01 January 2019
Invitation for full paper submission: 01 March 2019
Deadline of submission of full papers: 01 July 2019

Laboratory Phonology has received an Impact Factor of 1.0 for the 2017 release (0.87 without self-cites, both up from 0.667 for last year; data from Journal Citation Reports), and is ranked 73/181 in the category of Linguistics (up from 90/182).