Yiling Chen is an IPhD Phonetics and Phonology student who has kindly written a short account about her recent visit to BAAP.

It has been a wonderful experience presenting a paper at the 2016 BAAP Colloquium (British Association of Academic Phoneticians) which took place on 30 March — 1 April.

I fully enjoyed this 3-day event where many interesting talks were delivered by active phoneticians from a wide range of areas such as speech and language therapy, speech acquisition, speech technology and forensic science, etc. I have benefited a lot not just from a lively discussion following my presentation, but also from the socialization with other members in which we exchanged our ideas and shared our experience of researching.

I personally think the conference was well organized and very successful. The next colloquium will be held by the University of Kent in 2018. It is worth being a part of it for anyone who endeavors to pursue an academic career in phonetics and speech sciences, particularly graduate students. I believe you will be amazed and inspired by this informative and insightful conference as it has always been. 

My name is Dan McCarthy and I am a second year PhD student in Speech Sciences.

From 30 March to 1 April 2016 I attended in Lancaster the biannual BAAP Conference (BAAP standing for the British Association for Academic Phoneticians). I found this experience to be beneficial in a number of ways:

1. I had the opportunity of presenting the results of my pilot study to a broad academic audience. The members of BAAP number several hundred and work in a variety of topics related to phonetics (e.g. the production and perception of speech, acoustic analysis, forensic voice profiling, sociolinguistic variation). Presenting my results to such an audience of experts boosted my confidence in my research abilities and in my ability to communicate ideas clearly.
2. Attending the conference dinner helped me make new contacts in the academic world. In particular, I was able to get advice on what programming languages and statistical packages work best for my area.
3. My attention was drawn to research publications relevant to my research that I had been unaware of. (This was during my poster presentation.)
4. I had a number of interesting conversations with researchers engaged in similar areas of interest to my own, which was an enjoyable experience in my own right.
5. The other presentations at the conference gave me a feel for what research areas are currently being most extensively pursued. This included learning that there appears to be no one in the UK currently researching how to acoustically distinguish the places of articulation of plosive consonants (my own topic), although there are some researchers in the UK investigating the acoustics of somewhat similar consonants (e.g. /s/).
6. I learnt new information on topics not related to my own, by attending the above-mentioned talks and poster presentations.