New Sounds

New Sounds [https://newsounds2025.artsci.utoronto.ca/], or the 11^th International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech was held at UofT April 22-25, 2025. Physically hosted in Victoria College, it was a collaborative effort by an organizing committee with members from 4 universities, 3 campuses and 6 Depts of U of the Toronto.

Laura Escobar took some lovely pictures of the HLVC crowd:

254 papers were accepted, with authors from 21 countries.
LIN Department members who presented include:

“Phonetic aspects of gender acquisition in Spanish-English bilinguals”

Laura Escobar, Laura Colantoni, Ana Teresa Pérez Leroux & Danielle Thomas

“Distinguishing variation from interference: An investigation of chain vowel shift in Heritage Korean”

 Laura Griffin & Naomi Nagy

“Orthographic and training effects on the perception of the plain-

ejective contrast by naïve listeners” Jack Mahlmann & Yoonjung Kang

“An analysis of phonetic acquisition of L2 Oneida by adult English L1 learners”

Yanfei Lu

“New approaches to old sounds: Variation in Heritage Italian aspiration”

Naomi Nagy, Chiara Celata, Costanza Vallicelli & Manuela Frontera

“Perception of English stop voicing contrasts by L1 Arabic L2 English learners”

Miquel Simonet, Bouchra El Harrak, Mourad Abdennebi & Jessamyn Schertz

Members of several other UofT Departments, and some of our alum, also participated. For the full program and abstracts, please see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ikbIvCDhhfNy5Halsix6Wer3Yx9dSIEd/view?usp=drive_link

This conference couldn’t happen without the tremendous work of the organizers, 134 reviewers, and the commitment of sponsors and 20 volunteers. Sponsors include 11 entities at UofT, the CLA, SSHRC and Linguist List. We thank them for everything they have done to sustain this conference so we could all come together and share our work.

The Organizational Committee: