Speakers

Bene Bassetti

Bene Bassetti, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer (=Associate Professor) in Bilingualism and Language Learning at the University of Birmingham (UK). Bassetti is interested in the acquisition and use of additional languages and writing systems, and in particular in the relationship between language and cognition in language learners and sequential bilinguals.

 


Piero Cossu

Piero Cossu is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pisa. He will defend his dissertation “Studies on the interface between phonology and orthography” where he presents three case-studies concerning the influence of orthographic representation on the phonological one in Italian. His research interests concern segmental phonology and the relationship between written and spoken language.

 


Martin Evertz

Martin Evertz is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cologne. His research interests include suprasegmental phonology and graphematics and their relationship to each other and language teaching.

 


Silke Hamann

Silke Hamann is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. She is working on the phonetics-phonology interface, especially on the connections between perceptual cues and phonological features and segments, and the modelling of the use of these connections in speech perception and production. More recent work of hers also includes the mapping of graphemes onto phonological representations, and how this mapping interacts with cue-phoneme mappings in loanword adaptation and in the acquisition of a second language.

 


Barbara Hans-Bianchi

Barbara Hans-Bianchi is an Associate Professor in German Language and Translation at the Department of Human Studies at the University of L’Aquila, Italy. Her research interests include Writing and Orthography, Spelling acquisition in L2/L3, Construction Grammar, and Grammaticalisation. She is currently concentrating on Contact Linguistics.

 


Francesco Rovai

Francesco Rovai is Associate Professor at the University of Pisa. His research interests include sociolinguistic variation and language change in Latin, as well as aspects of multilingualism in the Ancient Mediterranean. He is currently working on the dialectics between orthography and paleography in Republican Latin.

 


Rosso Manuel Senesi

Rosso Manuel Senesi is a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at the University of Pisa. Rosso’s research focuses on the linguistic deficit in Dyslexia. The aim of his research project is to analyze the development of phonological knowledge and graphematic representations in children with developmental dyslexia, and the way in which the two interact with each other during development.

 


Richard Sproat

Richard Sproat is a Research Scientist at Google, Japan in Tokyo.  He has worked in numerous areas of linguistics and computational linguistics, including syntax, morphology, computational morphology, articulatory and acoustic phonetics, text-to-speech synthesis, and text-to-scene conversion. At Google he works on multilingual text
normalization, most recently using deep learning.  He also has a long-standing interest in writing systems and symbol systems more generally.