Newsletter – volume 6 – October 2018

Monica and Martin: From 1 Oct to 30 Nov a new section called Reporting Period will be active at the Participant Portal in order to produce the Periodic Report 1. All the Beneficiaries must keep up to date their Continuous Reporting (publications, Declaration of the Researchers, secondments…), contribute to its Technical Section Part B, as well as submit their Financial Statements to the Coordinator in time. Subject to its approval by the REA, ENRICH will receive its interim payment. Following the MTR meeting, the REA will produce an assessment that Mónica will circulate to all the ENRICH members. Congratulations on your effort to prepare for it!! We will shortly be asking supervisors to provide 1-sentence justifications for all changes in secondments (existing and planned) relative to those mentioned in the GA, as requested by the PO. Martin will circulate some example justifications. D5.1 Mid-term Evaluation was successfully submitted (Milestone 6) on 28 Sept. Thanks to everyone who contributed to it.

Sneha: participated in the ‘5 min PhD contest’ on 9th of September, at the Speech Production Summer School in DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, India (A satellite event of Interspeech 2018).

Sneha’s: paper titled ‘Listening to Laryngectomees: A study of Intelligibility and Self-reported Listening Effort of Spanish Oesophageal Speech’ is accepted at IberSpeech 2018 Conference. It will be presented in November in Barcelona, Spain.

Anna (Sfakianaki): has a paper out on hearing impairment and coarticulation with Katerina Nicolaidis, Areti Okalidou and George Vlahavas entitled “Coarticulatory dynamics in Greek disyllables produced by young adults with and without hearing loss” (Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics) link

Olina, Sneha, Shifas and Dipjyoti: attended Interspeech 2018 held in Hyderabad, India,. The theme of the conference was ‘Speech Research for Emerging Markets in Multilingual Societies’. There were posters, oral presentations, Show and Tell sessions, tutorials and satellite conferences that ran in parallel and covered a wide variety of research topics such as deep learning, speech processing and linguistics. During the conference, a few of us attended a ‘students meet experts’ event where several experts from academia and industry shared their experiences and answered queries from current students.  Attending Interspeech was not only an opportunity to learn about the current work in our field but also an enriching opportunity to network with people that come from different disciplines and countries around the world.  Shifas, Avashna and Olina presented their work and received valuable feedback.   The conference ended with a very energetic Bollywood music party, which was a great idea. It was nice to relax and enjoy ourselves after the intense information overload of work during the four conference days!

Anna: Registration for SPiN 2019 (10-11 January 2019, Ghent) is now open! Abstract submission deadline is 29 October. As the winner of the Collin Cherry Award this year, Anna will be presenting her work. Information can be found here

Clara: 1) is the best participant ever for studies on language learning in immersion: After 25 years of pure monolingualism (despite hours of L2 and L3 learning at school) she ended up speaking English, living in the UK and Spanish, living in Spain. 2) Still, her 4 year-old son (Eliott) already speaks Spanish much better than she does… and makes fun of her French accent! 3) So she is selfishly starting a new line of research on “L2 speech sound production optimization through feedback alteration”, in collaboration with Maria Koutsogiannaki who most of you know… and anyone else interested is welcome to take part in this collaboration!

Inma: 1) As a little child (3y), she learnt to read music notes (and sing them) before she knew how to read full words and was a piano teacher at 13. 2) Before entering University, she pre-registered both in Philosophy and Engineering 3) She has climbed hundreds of 1000m mountains, dozens of 2000s, many 3000s, one 4000 and one 5000. Then her first child came to world 😉