ISMBS
Welcome to the Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech!
The Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech (ISMBS) aims at the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge on monolingual, bilingual/multilingual acquisition and use in typical and atypical speech, in childhood and adulthood.
The International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech (ISMBS) (here) will take place at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL) (here). The next conference, originally planned to take place on 18-21 February 2021, has now been postponed to 5-8 April 2022.
ULL campus
ISMBS hosts original research on the acquisition and use of first language, second language, bilingual, and dialectal speech, child and adult, normal and disordered. The Symposium encourages a multidisciplinary exchange of ideas across phonology, phonetics, morphology, syntax, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, clinical phonetics and linguistics, speech pathology, acoustics, neurolinguistics, educational linguistics, gestural language, and the application of new technologies. Theoretical, experimental, observational, and computational contributions are welcome.
ISMBS has previously organized four international conferences in Chania, Crete, Greece (here): ISMBS 2019, ICPC 2018, ISMBS 2017, and ISMBS 2015.
ISMBS sprang from yearning for a specialized conference on speech that cuts across dividing boundaries between language sub-fields: first language, second language, bilingual, multilingual; child or adult; normal or disordered. The Symposium aspires to encourage investigations that widen existing horizons and perspectives, kindling a holistic viewpoint, fostering collaborations across the board and, ultimately, sparking innovative thought and approaches.
The Institute's and Symposium’s emblem depicts Demosthenes, a prominent statesman in ancient Athens of the 4th century B.C. As a child, Demosthenes suffered from rhotacism, a speech impediment whereby the rhotic was mispronounced as a lateral. He overcame this by practicing with pebbles in his mouth, and established himself as the greatest of Greek orators. As ‘a citizen of the world’ in his own words, he aptly epitomizes the outreach as well as the empirical and theoretical implications of this symposium in child and adult monolingual and bilingual speech, when he says: ‘as a vessel is known by the sound, whether it be cracked or not, so men are proved by their speeches ...'
Elena Babatsouli, PhD
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
President, Association of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech
Recent publications
