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Lab Phon has received an Impact Factor of 0.667 for the 2016 release, and is ranked 90/180 in the category of Linguistics.

Guest Editors Jonathan Harrington, Marianne Pouplier and Eva Reinisch are soliciting high-quality contributions on the topic of Abstraction, Diversity and Speech Dynamics for a Special Issue of Laboratory Phonology.

Producing and perceiving speech involves the parallel transmission of numerous types of signs or categories, both linguistic (e.g. words and their constituent consonants and vowels) and indexical (social class, regional affiliation, gender etc.). The production of speech also involves a coordinated activity of some hundred muscles per second that is adapted to speaking and situational contexts. While it has long become clear that the linguistic and social as well as the cognitive and physical aspects of speaking are tightly intertwined, quite how these multiple layers of semiotic and signal aspects of speech are connected and how those connections may be manifested differently in the world's languages and cultures remains poorly understood.

The aim of the special issue is to advance the discussion on these issues by bringing together scientists from various disciplines engaged in research on areas such as memory and its relationship to abstraction, feedback and feedforward control systems, and modelling the association between discrete categories and continuous speech dynamics. It is only with a deeper understanding of the semiotic-signal association that breakthroughs can be achieved in understanding how the sounds of language are acquired, in how normal and disordered mechanisms of speech are related, and in the way that social and linguistic information interact and are transmitted in speech communication.

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