LabPhon 20 was held in Montréal, Canada from June 26–28, 2026, hosted by McGill University, Carleton University, and the University of Ottawa. Sixteen current faculty and students from our department presented, including:
- Ben Eischens (faculty), w/ Ryan Bennett: “Incomplete neutralization for nasality in Mixtec: the role of abstraction”
- Claire Moore-Cantwell (faculty) and Zachary Metzler (PhD student), w/ Yanran Mou: “Stress is represented suprasegmentally, but differently, in words and nonwords”
- Cor Zanda (PhD student) and Sakshi Singh (PhD student): “A preliminary model of Haryanvi intonation”
- Coralie Cram (PhD student): “Cross-linguistic variation in coarticulation in two Australian languages”
- Jae-Eun Jennifer Shin (PhD student), w/ Sahyang Kim (PhD alum) and Taehang Cho (PhD alum): “Phonotactics say no but gestures say yes: Gestural invariance in Korean coda clusters”
- Jian-Leat Siah (PhD student), w/ Feng-Fan Hsieh, Yueh-Chin Chang, and Sam Zukoff: “Gradient overapplication in Malay reduplication: Direct aerodynamic evidence for Base-Reduplicant Correspondence”
- Jian-Leat Siah (PhD student) and Kie Zuraw (faculty), w/ Yu-An Lu and Shih-Chi Stella Yeh: “Investigating the perceptual basis of labial dissimilation in Paiwan”
- John McGahay (PhD student): “A computational model of merger as phonetic dispersion over words”
- Kevin Liang (PhD student), w/ Gemma Repiso Puigdelliura: “Infants learn saltatory alternations: evidence from Catalan”
- Khang Ðinh (PhD student) and Jian-Leat Siah (PhD student): “Syllabification of vocoids in Malay: Evidence from musical text-setting”
- Kie Zuraw (faculty): “Dimensions: looking back, looking forward” [invited]
- Marisabel Cabrera (PhD student) and Megha Sundara (faculty): “The developmental roots of cumulative phonotactic effects mapping”
- Megha Sundara (faculty), w/ Connor Mayer (PhD alum), Canaan Breiss (PhD alum), and Will Chih-Chao Chang: “Modeling the role of stress and prosodic boundaries in infant phonotactic learning”
- Megha Sundara (faculty), w/ Jeremy Steffman (PhD alum) and Seb Segger-Staveley: “Generalisation across talkers but not place of articulation in perceptual learning for phonotactics”
- Sun-Ah Jun (faculty), Jian-Leat Siah (PhD student), Hunter Johnson (PhD student), and Marisabel Cabrera (PhD student): “Boundary tones of the accentual phrase in Paraguayan Guarani”
Also, 22 additional former members of the department presented their research. They are (in alphabetical order):Suzy Ahn (University of Ottawa; former lecturer), Mary Baltazani (University of Oxford; PhD alum), Adam Chong (Cambridge University; PhD alum), Abby Cohn (Cornell University; PhD alum), Margaret Cychosz (Stanford University; former faculty), Noah Elkins (Haverford College; PhD alum), Matthew Faytak (University at Buffalo; former postdoc and lecturer), Edward Flemming (MIT; PhD alum), Cécile Fougeron (Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (UMR 7018), CNRS & Sorbonne Nouvelle; former exchange PhD student), Matt Gordon (UC Santa Barbara; PhD alum), Marie Huffman (SUNY Stony Brook; PhD alum), Hironori Katsuda (University of Kansas; New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour from June 2026; PhD alum), Jianjing Kuang (Univ. of Pennsylvania; PhD alum), Suyuan Liu (University of British Columbia; BA alum), Laura McPherson (Dartmouth; PhD alum), Benjamin Munson (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; former graduate student), Amy Schafer (University of Hawaii at Manoa; former postdoc), Jeremy Steffman (University of Edinburgh; PhD alum), James White (University College London; PhD alum), James Whang (Seoul National University; BA alum), Colin Wilson (Johns Hopkins University; former faculty), Jie Zhang (University of Kansas; PhD alum).
On the pre-conference day (June 25, 2026), Taehong Cho (PhD 2001) gave a pre-conference keynote lecture, titled “From Universals to Variation: Phonetic Grammar through Prosody”.On the last day of the conference, Sun-Ah Jun chaired the Annual General Meeting and completed her term as President of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
After the conference, many people attended the UCLA reunion dinner, arranged by Jian-Leat and Sun-Ah. Two group photos were taken — one in the lobby of Coeur des Sciences at L’Université du Québec à Montréal, and the other, at a local restaurant, after dinner.
