The IPA is saddened to note the passing of Emeritus Professor Adrian John Fourcin (30 August 1927 – 10 April 2026), a monumental figure in experimental phonetics, speech science, and hearing research.

As Head of the Phonetics and Speech Sciences Laboratory at University College London (UCL) from 1961 to 1992, and subsequently Professor Emeritus of Experimental Phonetics, Professor Fourcin led decades of transformative interdisciplinary research at the intersection of engineering, phonetics, and clinical medicine.

Among his most groundbreaking achievements was his invention of the electrolaryngograph in the 1960s. By enabling non-invasive, highly precise measurement of vocal fold contact, the laryngograph revolutionized acoustic research, speech forensics, and vocal rehabilitation worldwide. Beyond voice analysis, Professor Fourcin made seminal contributions to speech processing strategies for cochlear implants, significantly advancing auditory and speech perception for deaf individuals.

A founding member and Fellow of the British Voice Association (BVA), his extraordinarily productive career spanned over seven decades and more than 130 publications. His research scope encompassed neuro-temporal pitch processing and voice quality assessment as well as clinical studies on Parkinson's disease, amusia, and birdsong rhythm.

Professor Fourcin’s legacy endures through the generations of researchers, clinicians, and patients whose lives and work were enriched by his visionary instruments and warm mentorship.

The IPA is saddened to note the passing of Christine Helen Shadle, an internationally respected speech scientist and a leading authority on the acoustics and production of fricatives. She died in New Haven, Connecticut, on 24 January 2026, shortly before her seventy-second birthday. She was born in Pasadena, California, on 6 February 1954 and grew up in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Christine's career united two interests that remained central throughout her life: engineering and music. She completed a double major in Electrical Engineering and Music, with a focus on piano performance, at Stanford University in 1976. Following two years at Bell Laboratories, she undertook doctoral research at MIT under Kenneth Stevens. Her PhD, completed in 1985, investigated the acoustics of speech production, particularly fricatives—a subject that would occupy her for the next four decades.

Hunt and NATO postdoctoral fellowships took her to the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton and subsequently to KTH in Stockholm. She later joined Southampton’s Department of Electronics and Computer Science and spent part of 1995 as an invited researcher at ATR in Kyoto. In 2004, she moved to Haskins Laboratories in New Haven as a Senior Research Scientist. From 2023, she also held an appointment as a research scientist in the Yale Child Study Center.

Christine made distinctive contributions by connecting the physical mechanisms of speech production with their observable acoustic consequences. Her research combined aerodynamic theory, mechanical and acoustic modelling, detailed spectral analysis, and MRI-derived representations of the vocal tract. She greatly advanced understanding of how fricative noise is generated, shaped by vocal-tract geometry, and modified by voicing, place of articulation, and vowel context. Her later work refined acoustic measures for fricatives and questioned established methods of analysing spectra, formants, and resonances. Her scientific interests also extended to electrolaryngeal speech, speech following glossectomy, articulatory timing, and the acoustics of the operatic singing voice.

Christine was a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of the Editorial Board of ASA Press, and a member of the IPA since 2014. An accomplished pianist and choral singer, she was deeply involved in the New Haven Oratorio Choir and the Unitarian Society of New Haven. She is survived by her husband, Andrew Currie, and her sister Paula.

A gifted scientist and musician, and a much-loved colleague, Christine is greatly missed.

The IPA is saddened to note the passing of Professor Alan Wrench, Consultant Professor at Queen Margaret University and founder of Articulate Instruments.

Following his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1989, Alan devoted his career to advancing the measurement, analysis, and visualization of speech articulation and swallowing mechanics. His contributions bridged engineering, phonetics, and clinical pathology. Among his key achievements were the creation and co-creation of pivotal databases—including MOCHA-TIMIT, UltraSuite, and TaL—as well as the development of the widely used Articulate Assistant Advanced (AAA) software platform.

Through founding Articulate Instruments in 2003, Alan transformed clinical speech science. His pioneering work spanned hardware and software innovations—from early developments in electropalatography and optopalatography to probe-stabilisation headsets and modern machine-learning applications for articulatory tracking.

His technologies continue to impact research and treatment worldwide, particularly in visual biofeedback for speech sound disorders, speech rehabilitation following oral cancer surgery, and the assessment of swallowing kinematics.

In 2025, the IPA PhD Thesis Award Committee reviewed an exceptionally strong pool of submissions, with dissertations of very high scientific quality. After careful evaluation and discussion the committee decided to confer the award ex aequo, recognizing two outstanding theses whose scholarly excellence, originality, and contribution to the field of phonetics stood out in a particularly compelling way.

The awardees were Dr. Maria Lialiou, with the dissertation “Prosody and attention orienting: The role of rising intonation in speech processing”, and Dr. Anna Persson, with the dissertation “Comparing theories of pre-linguistic normalization for vowel perception”. These theses impressed the reviewers by their high scientific rigor,
conceptual clarity, and substantial contribution to phonetic research.

Maria Lialiou is a researcher at the University of Cologne. Integrating neurophysiological and behavioral methods such as EEG, pupillometry, reaction time and memory tasks, alongside analyses of speech production data, she investigates how intonational cues guide listener attention and interact with pragmatic context to shape communication.

Anna Persson is a senior lecturer in Bilingualism at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism at the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism of Stockholm University. In her research, she investigates underlying cognitive mechanisms that enable stable speech perception across talkers, using a combination of acoustic analysis, perception experiments and computational models.

We warmly congratulate the winners and all the other applicants for the high standards achieved.

Dear IPA members and ICPhS friends!

The International Phonetic Association is pleased to announce that the Proceedings of the 19th and 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019, Melbourne, and ICPhS 2023, Prague) have been accepted for indexing in the Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI) of Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The inclusion of our ICPhS proceedings in CPCI significantly enhances their international visibility, accessibility, and citability. It ensures that contributions are systematically indexed and traceable within one of the world’s most widely used research databases, thereby strengthening the impact and recognition of work presented at the congress.

The indexing applies retrospectively to the 2019 and 2023 proceedings, and it provides a strong basis for the inclusion of future ICPhS proceedings, including those of the upcoming ICPhS 2027 in Victoria, Canada, subject to the usual evaluation processes.

The IPA warmly thanks all colleagues involved in the preparation, review, and publication of the ICPhS proceedings. We invite our members and the wider phonetic community to join us in celebrating this important milestone.