Special Session Information

Phonological Malleability

The date for the Special Session is TBA.

Phonological representations are malleable in the sense that they may undergo change. Over the course of L1 & L2 acquisition, long-term representations of phonological categories must be constructed and refined according to experience. In speech, the realization of phones may deviate from stored representations depending on the morphophonological, prosodic, and segmental context. The nature of these changes is not free, but constrained by perception, motor control, abstract computation, and other cognitive biases. In this special session, we aim to discuss the limits on phonological malleability, both over the course of acquisition and within a particular language. We welcome formal, experimental, and computational approaches toward this theme, along with projects that address the following questions:

  • What aspects of phonological structure are most malleable during and after learning?
  • Are there phonological properties that rarely (or never) undergo change?
  • To what extent is the malleability of different phonological structures language-specific?
  • How can these patterns of learning and refinement inform our theory of phonological representation?

The abstract submission portal for the main session and special session can be found here

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