Report: The Third International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2012)
报告: 第三届语言声调问题国际研讨会（TAL 2012）
Wentao Gu 顾文涛

Abstract 摘要
The Third International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2012) was held in Nanjing, China during May 26-29, 2012. It was a long-awaited event following TAL 2004 (Beijing, China) and TAL 2006 (La Rochelle, France). After six years’ interruption, TAL was revived in Nanjing and also was promoted into a renowned international meeting. The website of TAL 2012 is www.tal2012.org. TAL 2012 was organized and chaired by Prof. Wentao Gu at Nanjing Normal University, supported by Nanjing Normal University, especially by the School of Chinese Language and Culture as well as the Institute of Linguistic Science and Technology. The conference venue is on the Suiyuan Campus of Nanjing Normal University. After the organizer’s efforts, TAL 2012 was jointly hosted by the International Speech Communication Association, the International Phonetic Association, the ISCA Speech Prosody Special Interest Group, the ISCA Special Interest Group on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, the Japan-China Science and Technology Exchange Association, the Phonetic Association of China, the Chinese Information Processing Society of China, the Acoustical Society of China, the Chinese Dialect Society, and the English Pronunciation Teaching and Research Association of China. All these ten international or domestic academic communities were deeply involved in this multidisciplinary symposium for tonal study. Tone is one of the most fascinating features in spoken languages, including not only lexical tones in tone languages but also pitch patterns (i.e. intonational tones) in non-tone languages. The theme of TAL 2012 is ‘Tonal Aspects across Tone and Non-Tone Languages’ which is a natural extension of the theme of TAL 2004, i.e. ‘with an Emphasis on Tone Languages.’ Following the heritage of the past two symposia, TAL 2012 continued to be focused on tone languages, covering studies of tones from phonetic, phonological, psychological, technological, and pedagogic points of view; but also encouraged the studies on tonal aspects of non-tone languages and singing. This symposium emphasized the relationship between phonetics and phonology of tones, the relationship between production and perception of tones, the modeling of tones, and the practical utilization of tonal information in spoken language processing. In particular, TAL 2012 extended its interests to neural sciences exploring the neural mechanisms of tone processing. The symposium provided an opportunity for linguists, phoneticians, psychologists, language educators, speech pathologists, and speech engineers from all over the world to get together to share and deepen their understanding of the form and function of tones in the languages of the world. TAL 2012 had attracted successfully the attention of phonetic and speech communities in the world. Although the timing of TAL 2012 overlapped seriously with several other phonetics-related conferences, TAL 2012 still received much more paper submissions than before. For each paper submission, three expert reviewers were assigned, among whom at least two reviewers were from overseas. Among 86 paper submissions, 60 papers were finally accepted for presentation. The rate of acceptance is below 70%. Among the accepted papers, there is obviously a concentration on Mandarin Chinese, but many other Chinese dialects are discussed as well, such as the dialects in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, Tianjin, and in lesser known places like Hohhot and Wuxi. There are also papers discussing the neighboring languages such as Black Miao of Yunnan, Kammu of Laos, Mo Piu of Vietnam, and Thai. More distantly, we have papers on two tone languages of Africa: Igbo in Nigeria, and Sesotho in South Africa. There is a strong tradition of tone studies in African languages, and it is important to understand how these tone languages are similar and/or different from the Asian ones. Instead of merely dealing with tones as static patterns, there are also many papers that discuss the dynamics of how these patterns interact in cases of sandhi, as well as how they sometimes neutralize and merge. Also very important are studies which examine tones and intonation from different theoretical perspectives as well as from different modeling approaches. Most impressively, this symposium has reports which examine how tones are processed neurophysiologically; for instance, how pitch patterns are normalized into discrete categories, how tones lateralize in the brain, and how top-down processes in perception integrate with those which are bottom-up. As Prof. Wang said in his welcoming remarks: It will be advances in this experimental dimension that will eventually move our area forward from description to explanation, to understand more and more deeply how these tiny rapid vibrations in our larynx came to play such an overwhelmingly important role in human communication. TAL 2012 is an indeed international meeting. There were altogether 130 participants from all five continents including 15 countries/areas. Among them, there are 68 from Mainland China, 20 from Europe, 18 from Hong Kong or Taiwan, 16 from America, 5 from other countries in Asia, 2 from Africa, and 1 from Oceania. To encourage students and young researchers to participate in the symposium, TAL 2012 successfully obtained the support from ISCA Grants, IPA Student Grants, and JCSTEA Student Grants. TAL 2012 became the first workshop (besides the flagship conference ICPhS) supported by the IPA Student Awards from the International Phonetic Association. After four tutorials on the afternoon of May 26, the opening ceremony of TAL 2012 was held on the morning of May 27. The Chair of TAL 2012, Prof. Wentao Gu opened the symposium with introductory remarks, which were followed by the welcoming speech by the Vice President of Nanjing Normal University, Prof. Baiqi Pan, and the Director of the Institute of Linguistic Science and Technology of NNU, Prof. Baojia Li. Then, seven distinguished scholars presented their welcoming addresses on behalf of different organizations, including Prof. Hiroya Fujisaki from the University of Tokyo (founder of TAL; Vice President of the Japan-China Science and Technology Exchange Association; Academician of Engineering Academy of Japan), Prof. William S-Y Wang from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Editor of Journal of Chinese Linguistic; Academician of Academia Sinica), Prof. David House from KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Board member of the International Speech Communication Association), Prof. John Ohala from University of California at Berkeley (Council member and former President of the International Phonetic Association), Prof. Klaus Kohler from Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel (Editor of PHONETICA, and former President of the International Phonetic Association), Prof. Daniel Hirst from University of Provence (PAC member and founding Chair of the ISCA Speech Prosody Special Interest Group), and Prof. Aijun Li from Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Vice Chair of the ISCA Special Interest Group on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, and Vice President of the Chinese Phonetic Association). Their exciting words gave great stimulation to the symposium. During the four-day symposium, there were altogether 70 presentations, including 6 keynote speeches, 4 tutorials, 9 presentations in two special sessions, 25 presentations in five oral sessions, and 26 presentations in two poster sessions. The details are listed below.