On the first day, students from the University of Paris Cité welcomed the Cologne students at lunch, and everyone was happy to reconnect after a semester of virtual collaboration.

The first day began with presentations by Wayne Lee and Ali Yıldız, titled “How to Sound Gay in a Second Language.” Their study explored the acoustic characteristics of gay speech production in German-English bilinguals. Afterward, guest speaker Anisia Popescu from Université Paris-Saclay presented “Who Drops the /r/? Speaker-Driven Variation in French Final /r/ Deletion Through Forced Alignment.” In her presentation, students were introduced to working with speech corpora and learned phoneme-level transcription methods using forced alignment. 

On the second day, Xinfeng Yang from the University of Paris Cité presented his Master's thesis titled "Breaking Clusters: Vowel Insertion in English by Mandarin ESL Speakers (Production, Perception, Lexical Representation)". He had the opportunity to receive feedback from both students and professors. Following that, Dr. Johanna Cronenberg presented their project “The Effect of Lexical Stress on the Hiatus /ia/ in Laboratory versus Naturalistic Portuguese” in an interactive R session, where students practiced their data visualization skills in phonetics and engaged with open science practices by reproducing Johanna’s study on their own computers.

The conference concluded with students having the opportunity to meet Sam Kirkham (Lanchester University, UK), whose main research focus is the dynamic interplay between structure and variability in the sound systems of human language. Students had a first glimpse of Sam's work during the online seminar earlier in the semester, and here they had the chance to hear discussions about more advanced topics following his presentation on “Dynamical models of movement and mind in spoken language.”