GEMCON2011 successfully finished!!

We had a wonderful conference thanks to the many people involved in it - speakers, chairs, volunteers, and the enthusiastic audience.

What's GEMCON?

Japanese shows a contrast not only in vowel length but also in consonant length, which is one of the distinctive phonological features that characterize the language. This feature has attracted serious attention in the literature of Japanese phonetics and phonology, but many interesting questions remain to be examined from experimental and cross-linguistic perspectives. GemCon (International Workshop on Geminate Consonants) is a forum for experimental and theoretical studies of consonant gemination in Japanese in comparison with similar phenomena in other languages around the world. GemCon is financially supported by a collaborative research grant from the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL), titled 'Phonological Characteristics of the Japanese Lexicon'.

GemCon will be held once a year, addressing certain themes each year. The main theme of GemCon 2011 is: The phonetics and phonology of geminate consonants in Japanese, especially in loanwords.

List of speakers at GEMCON2011

・　Yukari Hirata and Shigeaki Amano (Colgate University / Aichi Shukutoku University)
・　Kaori Idemaru (University of Oregon)
・　Toshiko Isei-Jaakkola (Chubu University / University of Helsinki)
・　Hioaki Kato, Mee Sonu, Keiichi Tajima,Reiko Akahane-Yamada, and Yoshinori Sagisaka
　　(NICT/ATR / Waseda University / Hosei University / ATR Learning Technology / Waseda　University)
・　Itsue Kawagoe and Akiko Takemura (Kyoto Sangyo University / Kobe University)
・　Shigeto Kawahara, Melanie Pangilinan, and Kelly Garvey (Rutgers University)
・　Haruo Kubozono, Hajime Takeyasu and Mikio Giriko (NINJAL / Mie University / NINJAL)
・　Michinao Matsui (Osaka Health Science University)
・　Akio Nasu (University of Tsukuba)
・　Hiromi Otaka (Kwansei Gakuin University)
・　Shin'ichi Tanaka (Kobe University)