On September 18-20, 2014, the University of Victoria will host a conference on the (Phonetic) Building Blocks of Speech in honour of Professor John Esling, who will be retiring from UVic in 2014 after more than 32 years with the Linguistics Department.

Professor John Esling has had a distinguished and prolific career on the forefront of Articulatory Phonetics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, former editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, the former secretary and current President of the International Phonetic Association, and an internationally renowned leader in the field of Phonetic Sciences. (Phonetic) Building Blocks of Speech is intended to honour him and his immeasurable contributions to his field, his students, and his colleagues. It is also intended to reflect and carry forward his legacy of rigorous empirical and applied (phonetic) research. 

Themes of the conference —corresponding to areas of research in which Professor Esling has been most active— are:

1)        Articulatory phonetics
2)        Phonetic typology
3)        Acquisition of first and second language phonetics
4)        Language learning and teaching
5)        Clinical linguistics, speech sciences, and audiology
6)        Speech technology

See Phonetics at UVic for more details.

* * * * *

Work by the following invited speakers will be featured:

Jared Bernstein
Lise Crevier-Buchman
Jerold Edmondson
Scott Moisik
Francis Nolan
Shahrzad Saif

For more information, please see also the call for papers.