FORGE is delighted to announce a talk by our upcoming internal speaker: Marton Petyko (Linguistics & English Language). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
The motives attributed to the assumed trolls on three Hungarian left-wing political blogs

ABSTRACT
Although trolling has become a subject of increasing academic interest in the past 10-15 years, it has several aspects that have not been studied extensively yet. This talk attempts to contribute to the academic study of three under-researched aspects of trolling, namely (1) trolling in online informal political discourse, (2) trolling in non-English computer-mediated interactions and (3) the assumed motives attributed to trolls. I will discuss the results of a corpus-assisted case study that aimed to identify the motives that participants explicitly attribute to those whom they call trolls in 178 comment threads, consisting of 55,276 comments on three prominent Hungarian left-wing political blogs, B1, Örülünk, Vincent? and Varánusz. Thus, the paper is concerned with the assumed motives that participants attribute to the supposed trolls and not with the actual reasons for trolling in these online interactions. First, I will present four motives that the participants repeatedly attribute to the assumed trolls in the examined comment threads. Then, I will discuss how these assumed motives affect the way participants discursively portray the alleged trolls and depict perceived trolling in the investigated computer-mediated interactions.

TIME & PLACE
1200-1300, Mon 12^th Dec, County South B89

All are welcome to attend.

The Lancaster University Phonetics Lab and FORGE are delighted to announce a joint talk by our upcoming internal speaker: Dr Ricky Chan (Linguistics & English Language). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Tone coarticulation and implications for forensic speaker comparison

ABSTRACT
A major goal in forensic speaker comparison research is to identify variables in speech that are useful for characterising speakers. While research on individual phonetic parameters abound, few studies have focused on the between-speaker differences in sounds under the influence from connected speech processes, let alone with an explicit comparison with sounds produced in their citation forms. In this talk, I will report an experiment on the speaker-discriminatory powers of lexical tones under different speaking rate and tonal contexts, which are two main factors contributing to tone coarticulation. 20 native Cantonese speakers and 20 native Mandarin speakers were recruited and read speech in two speaking rates (normal vs. fast) and two tonal contexts (compatible vs. conflicting) were elicited. Results based on discriminant analysis show that coarticulated tones tend to perform worse in speaker identification than tones in their citation forms. Implications for forensic speaker comparison will be discussed.

TIME & PLACE
1200-1300, Mon 21^st Nov, County South C89

All are welcome to attend.