Colloquia / Seminars / Industry Talks

The linguistic dimension allows an extraordinary observation of man and his relationships whose many aspects are generally conveyed by spoken and written speech communication. Inside the linguistic domain, the phonetic field and the related phonological one characterize the speech on the base of different levels of analysis reflecting the historical period, the geographic area, as well as the psychological, sociological, cultural and professional spheres of the individuals. The presentation will propose a synthesis on the topic, mainly referring to the many years of personal research that began with the degree thesis in 1973 and which deals with a set of European languages, namely Sardinian, Italian, French, English, German and Ladin, as well as the tonal African Chadic Musey. Ultimately, it will essentially focus on current experimental procedures mostly concerning the acoustic analysis of linguistic units, which permit, as known, a numerical «translation», together with a set of different shape representations, of the auditory sensations produced by the related sounds. Experimental procedures, whose utility covers a wide range of applications in current different fields rotating around the speech communication, such as the linguistic domain (from the Dialectology to the modern Language Teaching), the advertising, the industry (i.e. the telecommunications, the security, the robotics), the medicine, the forensic, and so on.

Carlo Schirru is Associated Professor and he teaches General and Applied Linguistics as well as International Communication at the University of Sassari in Italy. In 1973, he received the Italian Degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures, and later the Teaching Diploma for English Language and Literature in Medium and High Schools. Permanently hired at the Italian University in the eighties, he transferred from Cagliari to Padua, and then to Sassari, teaching as well Phonetics and Phonology, and French Linguistics. He was director of several degree theses, as well as member of international doctoral dissertation committees, and of scientific and management committees at the Universities of Padua and Sassari. He carried out functions as Project Technical Assistant for various European Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and mobility). He researched for several years in foreign phonetic laboratories, starting from those of Grenoble and of Aix-en-Provence, in France, where he received as well the Diplôme d'Etudes Supérieures de Phonétique Française, the Maîtrise de Linguistique and the D.E.A. de Linguistique et de Phonétique. During the same period he also taught French to foreign students of different levels (included one pedagogical stage for French teachers), at the Centre Universitaire d'Etudes Françaises - Laboratoires d'Enseignement Audio-Visuel, and at the Comité de Patronage des Etudiants Etrangers of the University of Grenoble, as well as at the Cours d’été pour Etudiants Etrangers of the University of Aix-en-Provence. Afterwards he carried out research at the Romanisches Seminar of the University of Zurich (in Switzerland), then at the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, School of Health Related Professions, of the University of Birmingham (USA, AL), where he spent over one year as Visiting Professor, also thanks to a specific USA NIH grant. During this period, he also made a conference at the Department of Communication Disorders at the University of Tallahassee, Florida, entitled Interference in Pronunciation among Italian, French and English. Focusing on speech, his studies mainly relate to several of the segmental and prosodic acoustic phonetic/phonological features of languages like Sardinian, Italian, French, English, German, African Chadic Musey, and Italian Northeast Ladin. At present, he is spending a period of three months as Visiting Professor, investigating the relationships between acoustic and visual contributions in speaker recognition under the 2016-2019 Marie Curie IDENTITY project, at HK Baptist University, guest of Professor Yuen Pong Chi, Head of the Department of Computer Science.