Had a blast at #BAAP2026! [That also involved ripping my jeans while performing ballet at the bar (the drinks bar) for some of the conference dinner attendees who surely didn't ask for it] Jokes apart, amazing research being done and was happy to see Bayesian stuff!
Liked the questions, especially the ones I couldn’t answer.
Found the London crew!
Turns out, conference nerves are great training for the wall.
First academic talk at BAAP + my first 6a on a belayed rope. Milestones unlocked! 🎓🧗♀️
Researching how ASR systems handle whispered vs. modal speech. Where does vocal uniqueness come from? The journey continues! 🚀
#BAAP2026 #uniofwarwick
I really enjoyed #BAAP2026, meeting colleagues old and new, and seeing the diversity and strength of phonetics (which is so often +something, like psychology, social issues, tech, language acquisition or in my case conversation analysis) in Britain.
An amazing time with the Newcastle phonetics group @phonncl.bsky.social at BAAP (the British Association of Academic Associations) #academicconferences
#warwickuniversity
#BAAP2026
alice-ross.github.io/files/BAAP_k...
Our #BAAP2026 poster, in which we gave some sentences to a popular commercial Text-to-Speech system and asked for voices that were "kind" or "competent" etc. and then analyzed what sociophonetic indexes resulted.
Listen: alias-alice.notion.site/Kind-is-the-...
Mian Feng with her poster and supervisors
At #BAAP2026 with Mian Feng presenting her PhD project on
"L2 listeners' perception of vowels in an unfamiliar accent: Lexical decision and transcription of West Yorkshire English". Co-authored with Gisela Tomé Lourido and pictured with Leendert Plug (co-supervisors).
Ooh, Nicole Whitworth is picking a fight at #BAAP2026: 'I actually prefer using Python to R' [for building glmms]
"When the IPA fails you, one solution is to start sprinkling diacritics around"
-Rasmus Puggaard-Rode
#phonetics #BAAP2026
Elinor Payne & Angelo Dian discuss intonational rises in Venetan*, which occur in both questions and declaratives, and which confuse the Italians they interact with! Turns out that declaratives can be rises or falls; polar questions also show rise-falls. #BAAP2026
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetia...
Andy Gibson starts off his #BAAP2026 talk by failing to find the lecture hall's resonance 😂
Then he explores the relationship between vowel quality choices and vocal resonance, between more 'speaky' to 'singy' singing styles, at different f0s. He ends by introducing a Praat-based tool for this.
Yanyu Li at #BAAP2026 train English listeners in perceiving lexical tone, using a cue-weighting approach that's previously worked for segmental training. Some listeners were given exaggerated tones and some non-exaggerated tones. Surprisingly, there was no difference, and little learning!
Adam Chong's #BAAP2026 talk looks at "Ethnicity effects in the production of lexical prominence in Singapore English", cos most previous work is on Chinese SgE speakers; there's little data from Malay or Indian SgE speakers. Results: Intonational marking, at a coarse level, does not seem to differ.
Those who use complete bursts are slowest; those who use strategies (like merging the stop with the vowel) are the fastest. There seems to be a speed-accuracy trade-off. Results also show that variability (less accuracy) increases with age (between 5-12), favouring the speed strategy. #BAAP2026
Anja Kuschmann et al. (presenter: Jane Stuart-Smith) on "Diadochokinetic* (DDK) rate performance and variability in 5-12-year-old children in Scotland"
*the ability to perform repeated syllables as fast and accurately as possible. #BAAP2026
Data from VariCS: varics.ac.uk
Ianto Gruffydd and Mercedes Durham's #BAAP2026 talk is on pre-/l/ breaking (e.g. "Wales" as "Way-uhls") in South East Wales English. Exploring how to operationalize a 'breaking onset point' as the acoustic measure to differentiate between tokens perceived as having breaking and those without.
Analysis of head pose, facial landmarks, and constrictions of facial muscles to explore phonetic correlations. Jaw movement operationalized as chin-nose distance. These results, and results for jaw velocity, correspond to the acoustic differences between the 'straight' and 'queen' styles. #BAAP2026
Liam Ó hír’s talk, “Giving Face and Body: Language, sexuality and bodily hexes in Japanese parodic performance“ is an analysis of Second Street, a gay comedy duo in Tokyo who perform directly comparable gay and straight characters. Love seeing this kind of talk on the big stage at #BAAP2026
Sarah Wang & Claire Nance: /l/-/n/ merger in Chinese. For Chongqing Mandarin L1 speakers, with Standard Mandarin L2, English L3, they didn’t distinguish /l/ and /n/ in their L1, but did in L2 and (even more) in L3. Proficiency modulates how much a speaker extends an L2 contrast to the L3. #BAAP2026
Rasmus Puggaard-Rode gives an interesting articulatory and acoustic analysis of Danish "soft-D" (a vocalized stop). It's articulated like a very front and low vowel, but its acoustics look like a central vowel! (OMG, #Danish is so wild, I love it.) #BAAP2026
Two people stand below a projected screen with text on it corresponding to the content of this post.
Starting off Day 2 of #BAAP2026: "Articulatory strategy as a source of variation in acoustic vowel dynamics" by Patrycja Strycharczuk, Justin Lo, & Sam Kirkham.
Individual differences in palate result in individual differences in /i/ production that aren't reflected in acoustics. #phonetics
Here at #baap2026 - you can see my poster via this link if you want to read about Forensic phonetic methods in authentic and synthetic sample comparison📈
Anyone on here also attending BAAP this year? Should the hashtag be #BAAP2026? Here's hoping the detailed programme is posted soon! #phonetics #speech #conference
sites.google.com/view/baap2026
