Speech Prosody 2006

The Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, Sweden, would like to present our bid to organize the next Speech Prosody conference, Speech Prosody 2006 in Lund. Our preference for the dates of the conference would be April 18-21 (Tuesday through Friday) 2006 and a conference venue in the centre of Lund.

Lund is a city in the south of Sweden, close to Denmark, with around 100 000 inhabitants. Lund University was founded in 1666. Today it is one of the biggest universities in Scandinavia with many faculties and more than 30 000 students.

The closest international airport is Copenhagen Airport in Denmark. From here it is easy to go to Sweden and Lund via the Sound Bridge (Öresundsbron), which opened in the year 2000. There are frequent train connections from Copenhagen airport to Sweden and Lund. The train ride takes less than an hour. For information on accomodation, see this list of hotels in Lund.

The Department of Linguistics and Phonetics has a rather long history of research on prosody. Scholars such as Bertil Malmberg, Kerstin Hadding and Eva Gårding have all been affiliated with our Department. The tradition of research on prosody is continued today. The department will move to the new Centre for Languages and Literature in 2005.

In September 1993 an ESCA (European Speech Communication Association) Workshop on Prosody with around 125 participants was organized in Lund by Gösta Bruce and collaborators from our Department.

We have support for organizing Speech Prosody 2006 from other circles in Sweden, among them the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH, Stockholm, and from the Phonetics Foundation, which was created after the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences held in Stockholm in 1995.

We would like to follow the tradition from the two earlier Speech Prosody Conferences and continue in the same spirit as the meetings in Aix and Nara.

Lund in April 2004,

   Gösta Bruce and Merle Horne