11 March 2020: Important announcement

We very much regret to announce that it has been necessary to cancel SPPL2020, which was due to take place in London on 30-31 March. UCL announced today that all arrangements for incoming external international visitors for seminars and conferences should be cancelled with immediate effect. We are reimbursing all registration fees in full.
We DO want SPPL2020 to happen in some form. The Book of Abstracts is currently being edited and will be posted online with open access. We will also be giving authors the option to send in either a poster or audio-narrated slides which will be uploaded onto the SPPL2020 website. Finally, we will be setting up a forum on the website so that there can be some discussion of papers and questions to paper authors. Further details about this virtual workshop will be posted in the next few days.

28 March 2020: Update

The Book of Abstracts is now online. We thank authors who have already sent in their presentations (posted on the Programme page) and look forward to receiving more when everyone’s situation allows.

This second workshop in the SPPL series (following SPPL 2017 organised in London in April 2017) will again provide an opportunity for interactions between researchers from areas of speech, hearing and language sciences research that may be focused on different developmental stages, e.g. early development and ageing. It will also discuss methodological issues, such as how to overcome the difficulty of developing tests that are equally appropriate for children, younger and older adults, and will consider ‘missing gaps’ in the developmental trajectory, e.g. data for older teenagers and middle-aged adults.

Although the focus of much research into speech development has been to establish when ‘adult-like’ performance is reached (with young adult speakers taken as a ‘norm’), it is increasingly clear that speech perception and production abilities are undergoing constant change across the lifespan as a result of physical changes, exposure to language variation, and cognitive changes at various periods of our lives.  Few studies have examined changes in speech production or perception measures across the lifespan using common materials and experimental designs. Studies that span over an extended age-range and longitudinal studies can further our understanding of the extent and direction of these changes for key measures of speech communication and of how these changes interact with cognitive, social or sensory factors. There is also a need for studies that seek to approximate ecologically-valid communication interactions. Such knowledge is essential to refine and extend models of speech perception and production.

This workshop is organised under the aegis of ESRC project ES/P002803/1 on ‘Speech masking effects in speech communication across the lifespan‘. We acknowledge financial support from the ESRC and the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at UCL.