Thanks to the amazing dedicated efforts of community-minded colleagues over many years, the International Speech Communications Association (ISCA) maintains the largest open archive of research papers in speech communications www.isca-archive.org

Are you interested in how people #cheer for long distance runners? There are some specific #prosodic patterns, nicely explained by Marzena Zygis from #ZAS also for laymen. run.outsideonline.com/road/road-ra... If you want to read the paper, it is here: www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Wie zum Beispiel diesen Kurs hier: Sociophonetics: The Creative Use of the Multiethnolect in German Rap. 😎

There's nothing new under the sun

There's nothing new under the sun

»Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain―that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel […] pleasure at its successes […]«

@lingucat.bsky.social #Tristaben share.google/XL41WYsPXtiQ...

Is the bouba-kiki effect evolutionary so much older than language? New research with just-hatched chicks “…makes the question of bouba-kiki being a solution to language evolution less interesting because it is prelanguage,” comments Aleksandra Ćwiek. 🤯 @acwiek.bsky.social

“…invoking linguistic determinism to explain LLM performance isn’t profound. It’s outdated. If we want serious conversations about AI and reasoning, we need to start from what linguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive science have already clarified over the last half century.” I totally agree!

My word of the day: »fašnik« — /ˈfáʃník/ m noun, short rising accent, Croatian, Kajkavian, from German „Fasching“, meaning carnival. At first glance, this is an example of relatively simple metathesis. However, -nik is a common masculine noun suffix. The word thus does not feel like a loan.

Do you have a favourite letter? Behold: Latin Capital Letter Sharp S: ẞ This is my favourite German letter (used in German only ― though not in Switzerland). Its codification fixed some orthographical problems with names, for example. Cute footnote: (lower case) ß is called ringel-s in Dutch.

»fair play must be given to the machine […] if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.« — Alan M. Turing, 1947. Turing asked why we should allow for occasional “blunders” from human experts but not from machines. (cited by A. Hodges, The Enigma, 2012:361)

🚨 Reminder 🚨 The call for games for #DGKL2026 is still open until February 25th! Do you have a game you developed for e.g. teaching linguistics, participant engagement in experiments, or else? Let people try your game in Bielefeld! 👉 CfG here: t1p.de/opy89 #linguistics #langsky #BLinguistik

“If you knew how something ended — would you still begin?” D. W. Moore's beautiful summary of Ted Chiang’s “Stories of your life” Just re-read this short story of dread, despair and memories of joy… and linguistics. Highly recommend!

Habt euch lieb! Nicht nur heute.

Don’t forget to enter the Koala Competition for your chance to win a free registration for #Interspeech2026! Competition entries close 26th Feb 2026, with the winner to be announced on 17th March interspeech2026.org/en-AU/pages/...

The #Interspeech2026 deadlines are approaching, with the call for papers closing on 25 Feb 2026. Log in to the submission portal early, and check out the welcome message and instructions in advance! interspeech2026.org/en-AU/pages/...

Very proud and happy about all my collaborations so far ― past and present! I learned so much from all of you. #CRC1646 #LINCC

Very cool way to learn more about spectrograms by having fun with squiggles and blobs. 🤓 Another fascinating video. As always!

#Throwback2016 LabPhon15 at Cornell University. Fond memories of collaborations past. Presented joint work with J. Roux, A. Coetzee, J. Bruni and my late Doktorvater G. Dogil on devoicing in Tswana. With A. Schweitzer and N. Lewandowski we showed that personality affects convergence. What a time!

More upcoming: At this year’s #ESSV conference, I will present a little study where we test some ASR systems with co-authors Laurens Winkler and Sina Zarrieß from the #CRC1646 #LINCC discussing “How well can LLMs handle novel phonetic forms?” ― www.essv.de/essv2026 @clausebielefeld.bsky.social

Upcoming: At this year’s #ESSV conference, I will present joint work by Robert Fromont, Jennifer Hay, Daniel Duran, Allie Osborne, Melanie Weirich, Miriam Oschkinat & Stefanie Jannedy: “Evaluating Full Automation of Computational Sociophonetics for the #Plapper Corpus” ― www.essv.de/essv2026

Fritz Seebauer from the #Bielefeld University #Phonetics group successfully defended his doctoral dissertation “Synthetic Speech Evaluation - Quality and Context”. Congratulations Dr. Seebauer! 🥳👨‍🎓

#Throwback2016 Buenos Aires, Argentina: International Congress on Acoustics. Amongst hardcore acoustics with numerical simulations — no LLMs, not even deep learning — me with a humble 3D computer game promoting #gamification in #phonetics research. I dare say, I was a professional game designer. 😎

Ever wanted to find out whether Bielefeld really exist? 🕵‍♀️ this is your chance! Two days left to submit an abstract for #DGKL2026 👇 conferences.uni-bielefeld.de/frontend/ind... 🐦🐦 #BLinguistik #Langsky

Started 2025 with an Erdős number not higher than 5*. Now I am at 4. ...only two more years to go! 🚀 (*taking into account all scientific publications, not restricted to mathematics)

Hannover kann kein Schnee. Totales Chaos hier 😂 In Esslingen war der Schneepflug jeden Tag in meiner Straße (eine verkehrstechnisch unwichtige Sackgasse), obwohl schon fast kein Schnee mehr lag. Hier in Langenhagen liegen etwa 20cm Schnee auf der Straße. Nix geräumt 😱

Sretna nova 2026. godina svima! Happy new year everyone!

Analysing cheering events for marathon runners... How would cheer them? Our colleagues studied prosodic patterns of cheering. www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

😂

Ever thought there can be word internal pauses??? Yes, it is possible. Work by Ludger Paschen

Damn, yet another factor to be controlled for in lab experiments 😀 Great work!

Can changes in word frequencies signal turn completion/continuation? I’m trying to answer this question here: www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....

How to elicit natural speech in different communicative settings in a controlled laboratory setting? Cool work in progress using virtual reality was presented by Miriam Oschkinat from #SFB1412 today at the linguistics CRC networking meeting in Bielefeld hosted by #CRC1646 @labphon-zas.bsky.social

#Jobs #Blinguistik #linguistics

Tomorrow, we will show within the science festival #geniale how AI voice modification can help explaining the subtle differences between voice qualities, expressing personality, age, mood, gender, health, and much more! #trr318, #bielefeld #tts #xAI wissenswerkstadt.de/veranstaltun...

📢 Call for papers! Join us in Sydney for #Interspeech2026, 27 September – 1 October 2026. Paper submission portal opens 17 Jan and closes 25 Feb. See you there! interspeech2026.org/en-AU/pages/...

Am I evil? Am I likeable? Need a 10 minutes break? Like Fantasy? Loath it? Take part in our study and help us by rating images of fictional characters here: bixprag.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/publix/0aSWK...

#CfP alert! 🚨 The call for papers and theme sessions for the next International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Bielefeld, 31.08.-02.09.2026) is finally out 🎉 www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/...

Do you even need visual social cues to trigger speech register effects? Imagining to address a friend vs a policeman is enough to change speaking style (f0 in this case). Check out our new paper in which we present an analysis of speech data collected with the #Plapper app: doi.org/10.1121/10.0...

Netflix-Doku #Babo — was wäre das unwahrscheinlichste, das ein Film über Haftbefehl auslösen konnte: www.deutschlandfunk.de/haftbefehl-d...

Rund um den Babo-Hype liest man nun oft: „Haftbefehl gehört in die Schulen“ Ganz meine Meinung! Ich habe da auch schon mal was vorbereitet: ― D. Duran, J. Happes & D. Schumacher (2024). Antisemitismus als „popkulturelles Phänomen“. In N. Hodaie et al. (Hrsg) (Deutsch-) Rap und Gewalt. Beltz Juventa.

Immer wieder schön, wenn im Bundesland, in dem man wohnt, ein Feiertag ist – aber im Bundesland, in dem man arbeitet, nicht. Frohes Schaffen!

More than 3200 papers? Wicked 🤓

»Lieber Friedrich, du hast echt bezaubernde Töchter Wir auch, aber uns’re hausen in Löchern« — Eko Fresh. Friedrich. 2025

Es muss doch eine bessere Berufsbezeichnung geben 🤔

Eine Stunde zu früh zum Termin aus dem Haus gehetzt und erst im Auto den Fehler bemerkt: Check! 🥴 #Zeitumstellung

Speech registers are not just about the choice of fancy words or complex linguistic constructions. Speakers also adjust their pronunciation in different situations. Check out our analysis of formal vs informal video interactions using a novel experimental paradigm: doi.org/10.1075/rs.2... #SFB1412