Workshop on Accommodation in Speech Communication

13 December 2018, University of Zurich, room KO2 F 152, Karl Schmid Strasse 4, 8006 Zurich, 08:30 - 19:00

Organized by Elisa Pellegrino and Volker Dellwo

URPP Language and Space of the University of Zurich is pleased to announce the Workshop on Accommodation in Speech Communication. The workshop, bringing together researchers working in the areas of phonetics and speech sciences, multimodality, interaction analysis, linguistics, psychology and computer sciences, aims to provide a forum for discussing corpora, methods and measures, currently applied in accommodation research to quantify convergence in speech communication.

As the phenomenon of accommodation occurs at several linguistic and extra-linguistic levels, and its dynamics may vary noticeably depending on speaker-specific, linguistic and situational factors, topics of the workshop address:

• Acoustic/articulatory measures of convergence in interactive and non-interactive speech tasks
• Multimodal synchronization in face-to-face interactions
• Lexical, grammatical, syntactic and conversational alignment in speech communication
• Indexical, linguistic and contextual factors affecting degree and direction of accommodation
• Code-mixing/switching in language contact situations

Given that accommodation is not a prerequisite of human-to-human speech interactions, we also include contributions dealing with:

• Accommodation in written interactions
• Accommodation in animal communication
• Human-to-machine, machine-to-human accommodation

• Rivka Levitan, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science, Brooklyn College CUNY
• Jennifer Pardo, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Speech Communication Laboratory at Montclair State University
• Antje Schweitzer, Postdoc, Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, Stuttgart University

Download Abstract Booklet (PDF, 316 KB)

Registration: The workshop is open and free of charge. All are welcome, but please sign up by sending an email to events@spur.uzh.ch by 10 December 2018.

Venue: Seminarroom KO2 F 152, Karl Schmid Strasse 4, 8006 Zürich

Contact person: Elisa Pellegrino, elisa.pellegrino@uzh.ch

Accommodation: A list of hotels and hostels near the University buildings can be found here: Link

Lunch options: Mensa and cafeterias near the University buildings are listed here: List (PDF, 109 KB)

Apero and dinner: After the workshop, we will have the opportunity to extend our discussions and exchanges in a more informal atmosphere. From 7:00 pm there will be an Apero and a standing Pizza dinner in Room RAA E 30 (Rämistrasse 59, 8001 Zürich), 8 min walking distance from the conference venue. No special registration is needed, but please sign up by sending an email to events@spur.uzh.ch by 10 December 2018.