Open lecture: A new approach to connected speech

The Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and the City of Poznań would like to invite you to take part in an on-line lecture delivered by Dr Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron (Northwestern University), entitled: "A new approach to connected speech: using phonological concepts and speech planning models to advance one another".  The lecture will be held on 13 April 2021 at 6:30 p.m.

Dr Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron - grafika artykułu
Dr Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron

The lecture will be available under the link

Dr Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron (linguistics) works at the Northwestern University as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics. She is a member of the laboratory for cognitive functions of speech SoundLab headed by Prof. Matthew Goldrick (Northwestern University), and she has already collaborated with many linguistic specialists, including Prof. Michael Wagner (McGill University). She received her PhD degree from McGill University.

Dr Kilbourn-Ceron is a well-known figure in the field of linguistics. Her research tackles in phonetics and phonology of the English language, speech production, and in particular acoustic speech corpus analysis. She uses the latest methods of statistical analysis (programming herself) and builds models to predict probabilistic effects in speech.

Her research interests are in the new and promising linguistic theory known as the Production Planning Hypothesis. This theory, or rather a theoretical school already, explains fast speech processes (in particular in an area hitherto little explored, i.e. processes that span word boundaries) using such speech planning effects as word frequency, conditional probability of its occurrence, speech rate or pause length.

For example, it depends on many factors whether a native English speaker, using a standard variety, chooses the "last night" or "las night" version (with the process removing /t/ that spans word boundaries). Dr Kilbourn-Ceron actively contributes to the study of this theory on multiple processes in multiple languages through numerous publications and conference presentations.

Despite her young age, Dr Kilbourn-Ceron is already held in esteem in the linguistic community, as evidenced not only by her good publications, but also numerous lectures delivered by invitation, including at McGill University, Universität Potsdam, Carleton University or Michigan State University (the last one to be held in 2021). She is a resilient scientist, winner of awards and competitions, organizer of conferences, engaged in publishing activities and numerous other projects (e.g. programming workshop Python For Linguists Workshop, 2017, Concordia Linguistics Student Association).

Reading her academic CV, we may expect that her open lecture will be an inspiring experience for Poznań residents and the academic community of AMU.