Abstract :
Since its inception in 1977, the Australian Language and Speech Conference (ALAS) has provided an important venue for researchers interested in speech and language to present and discuss their work with colleagues from various discipline backgrounds, including psychology, linguistics, speech science, and speech pathology. In 2005, the conference was hosted by the Speech Hearing and Language Research Centre (SHLRC) from the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. The programme comprised 43 submitted papers, covering a diverse range of topics including speech production and perception, visual word recognition, sentence perception, second-language processing, reading and spelling, language development, and language disorder. We were privileged to have two of Australia’s foremost psycholinguists presenting keynote addresses. Professor Catherine Best (MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney) spoke about Language-specific attunement of speech perception, and Professor Bryan Byrne (School of Psychology, University of New England) presented a paper entitled Longitudinal twin study of early literacy and language.
This year’s conference differed from previous years’ in being part of a wider, research-oriented “SummerFest” sponsored by the ARC Research Network in Human Communication Science (HCSNet). I am grateful to everyone concerned with HCSNet (but especially Professor Denis Burnham, Professor Robert Dale and Associate Professor Kate Stevens) for their advice and assistance with planning and organising ALAS, and for their substantial financial support. Thanks are also due to Professor Stephen Crain and Dr. Rosalind Thornton for their valuable input during the planning stages of the conference; and to the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science for offering financial support to two postgraduate students presenting papers at the conference.
