PG conference report: New Sounds 2013
A three-day conference on Second Language (L2) speech was held at Concordia University, Montreal,
Canada on the 17th – 19th May 2013. The conference was organised by Dr Walcir Cardoso, Dr Pavel
Trofimovich and Ms Rhonda Chung of the Department of Education and the Applied Linguistics Program at
Concordia University.
New Sounds 2013 was an international triennial conference and gathered researchers all over the world to
discuss a variety of issues related to L2 speech: perception and production, segments, prosody, pronunciation
teaching, bilingual, third language acquisition, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Therefore, this
conference provided a great opportunity for researchers working on the area relevant to L2 phonetics and
phonology to interact with each other, to build their network of contacts and to share their work and
knowledge.
The conference consisted of three plenary speakers: Dr John Archibald (University of Victoria), Dr Debra
Hardison (Michigan State University) and Dr Murray Munro (Simon Fraser University), 34 oral sessions (115
presentations) and 2 poster sessions (31 posters), which gave us an invaluable experience of listening to quite
a few big-name researchers’ talks.
This was my first oral presentation at an international conference. I presented a paper on the longitudinal
development of intonation in English learners of Japanese and received constructive criticism which prompted
a reanalysis of data. Such criticism was very helpful for raising the quality of my thesis prior to submission,
and thus I realised that I needed to present a more convincing argument to dismiss any criticism toward
research results. Through the presentation, furthermore, I felt the difficulty of handling questions properly,
which is an important skill required for presentation. I keep in mind that I should carefully strategize how to
handle questions beforehand.
New Sounds was a well-organised, successful and stimulating conference. The next New Sounds is held in
Aarhus, Denmark in 2016.
Nami Kaneko
PhD student in linguistics
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
Percy Building
Newcastle University