In addition to Katrin Heimann's talk there will also be a presentation by Marjoleine Sloos.

Abstract for Marjoleine's talk: 

Linguistics and the applied fields like second language acquisition and speech therapy heavily rely on human speech sound perception. Speech sound perception depends on the acoustic properties of the sound, but also on contextual effects of adjacent sounds, native variety of the listener, as well as social awareness, and expected features of the perceived variety. 

What is the result of this complicated mixture of acoustic, linguistic, and social perception? We investigated this question for the perception of French vowels from Canadian French and French from France as perceived by four listener groups: French, Canadian, Dutch who were informed about the variety they were listening to, and Dutch who were not informed. Results show that expectations about the variety biased perception for some vowels, but native language phonology biased perception other vowels.