Dear colleagues and students,
We are please to invite you to participate in the half-day workshop Stable perception of
spectral information across contexts: From normalization to adaptive category
representations<https://www.su.se/english/divisions/centre-for-research-on-bilingualism/about-the-centre/neurolinguistics-in-sweden-nls2026#h-Preconferenceprogramme>,
taking place on the morning of June 11th, 2026, in Stockholm, Sweden.
The workshop is open to all and free of charge. It serves as a pre-conference workshop to
NLS2026. The conference has recently extended its abstract submission deadline to March 2,
2026. We warmly encourage you to consider submitting your work.
About the workshop
This workshop brings together researchers from phonetics, cognitive science, neuroscience,
and speech technology to explore how listeners achieve stable speech perception despite
large differences between talkers and contexts. It focuses on low-level auditory
mechanisms involved in formant and spectral normalization, and how these rapid processes
interact with higher-level representations of linguistic categories and contexts. Through
invited talks and a focused discussion, we aim to connect insights from behavioral
studies, neural data, computational modeling, and machine recognition to address open
questions about normalization and adaptation in speech perception.
Invited speakers
Kasia Hitczenko (University of Delaware, USA)
Ediz Sohoglu (University of Sussex, UK)
Ondrej Šuch (Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia)
Santiago Barreda (University of California, Davis, USA)
T Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester, USA)
We would be very grateful if you could circulate this announcement within your networks.
We look forward to welcoming you to Stockholm in June.
Best wishes,
Anna Persson
anna.persson(a)su.se
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Dear colleagues and students,
Following our previous announcement, we are pleased to share the updated programme for the
half-day workshop Stable perception of spectral information across contexts: From
normalization to adaptive category representations, which will take place on the morning
of June 11th, in Stockholm (please see below).
We would be grateful if you could continue to circulate this information within your
networks, and we look forward to welcoming you to Stockholm in June.
Best wishes,
Anna Persson
anna.persson(a)su.se
Stable perception of spectral information across contexts: From normalization to adaptive
category representations
Time: Thursday 11 June, 8.30-12.00
Place: Pärlan, Campus Albano (House 1, floor 6)
One of the striking features of human speech perception is its stability: despite
substantial between-talker differences arising from variation in vocal tract physiology,
language background, and social factors, listeners typically understand speech with
relative ease. This workshop focuses on the auditory mechanisms thought to contribute to
such stable perception by normalizing the speech signal for differences in vocal tract
size and/or shape.
More specifically, the workshop aims to connect research on the early normalization of
formant and other spectral information with work on downstream adaptive mechanisms beyond
formants. Support for the existence of formant/spectral normalization has come from
behavioral experiments on speech perception, brain imaging studies, brain stem recordings,
and cross-species comparisons. However, important questions remain concerning the
computations underlying these rapid and seemingly automatic mechanisms, as well as the
extent to which they interact with top-down information from higher-level representations
of linguistic categories and contexts.
By bringing together researchers with complementary perspectives from phonetics, cognitive
science, neuroscience, and speech technology, the workshop aims to foster focused
discussions of open questions concerning speech perception, adaptation, and
formant/spectral normalization.
Thanks to generous support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the workshop is open to all and
free of charge. Please complete this free
registr<https://forms.gle/bp4Jh9kcVGHum3dA7>ation<https://forms.gle/bp4Jh9kcVGHum3dA7>
if you intend to attend the workshop but have not registered for NLS 2026 (so that we can
order adequate amounts of coffee/fika).
Workshop program
8.30 Welcome address and overview (Anna Persson)
8.45-9.25 Ediz Sohoglu (University of Sussex): Perceptual learning of modulation filtered
speech
9.30-10.10 Kasia Hitczenko (University of Delaware): Speech category imbalances hinder
normalization in naturalistic data
10.10-10.30 Coffee break
10.30-11.10 Santiago Barreda (University of California, Davis), T Florian Jaeger
(University of Rochester) & Anna Persson (University of Oslo): A one-shot model for
joint inferences of talker physiology and vowel recognition
11.15-11.55 Ondrej Šuch (Slovak Academy of Sciences): Phonetic explanation of speaker
identification systems
11.55-12.00 Wrapping up