Call for abstracts: Crowdsourced Speech and Automatic Alignment: New Frontiers for Laboratory Phonology @ LabPhon 20

This workshop explores the shift from controlled laboratory recordings to crowdsourced and automatically aligned speech data. Advances in speech technology and annotation tools now enable large-scale phonetic research but raise questions about data reliability, interpretability, and ethics. Alignment errors and variable recording conditions are especially common in spontaneous and heterogeneous data, where they challenge traditional analytical assumptions. Bringing together perspectives from phonetics, phonology, speech technology, and the social sciences, the session examines how these new data practices reshape laboratory phonology and invites discussion on developing transparent, linguistically informed, and socially responsible approaches to large-scale speech analysis.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Data variability, recording conditions, and alignment challenges
• Integrating phonetic and phonological knowledge into automatic methods
• Cross-dialectal, cross-linguistic, and socio-demographic variation
• Statistical and computational methods for large, heterogeneous corpora
• Ethical issues and interdisciplinary collaboration

Organizing committee 

• Martine Adda-Decker, LPP/CNRS, France
• Ioana Chitoran, Paris Cité University, France
• Johanna Cronenberg, LPP/CNRS, France
• Adèle Jatteau, University of Lille, France
• Lori Lamel, Vocapia Research, France
• Mélanie Lancien, University of Lorraine, France
• Mark Liberman, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Anisia Popescu, LISN/CNRS, France
• Laura Spinu, City University of New York, USA
• Paola Tubaro, CREST/CNRS, France
• Ioana Vasilescu, LISN/CNRS, France
• Yaru Wu, University of Caen Normandy, France (Coordinator)

Submission instructions

The formatting should adhere to the LabPhon abstract formatting requirements:

• Written in English
• Maximum of one page of text; references, examples, and/or figures may be included on a second page
• Submitted as a PDF file
• Times New Roman font, size 12, single spacing, 1-inch margins
• Filename format: Paper_title.pdf (e.g., Looking_back_and_looking_forward.pdf)
• Do not include author names or affiliations in the filename or in the abstract itself

Important dates

• Submission deadline: Sunday March 15, 2026, 11:59PM, Anywhere on Earth (AoE)
• Notification of acceptance: March 31, 2026.
• Date/Time of the workshop: 9:00–12:15 (local time), June 25, 2026
• Location: TBA (but the same place as the conference venue, in Montréal, Québec, Canada)

Contact

yaru.wu@unicaen.fr