The IPA has granted four IPA Student Awards to cover the registration fee for student members attending the Third International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2012), to be held in Nanjing China May 26-29. The recipients of the Awards are Jianjing Kuang of UCLA (USA), Jeff Malins of the University of Western Ontario (Canada), Stephen Politzer-Ahles of the University of Kansas (USA), and Robert Xu of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Congratulations to the first recipients of the IPA's new IPA Student Award program.

Application is now closed. Results are announced here.

The IPA is co-sponsoring the Third International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2012), to be held in Nanjing China May 26-29. Under its newly-established IPA Student Award program, the IPA is offering up to four Awards to cover the TAL registration fee. Applicants for these Awards must be (1) first and presenting author on a paper accepted by TAL 2012, and (2) an eligible member of the IPA: student member, unemployed member, member under age 35, or member from a low-income-level country. Applicants may join the IPA at the time of application, as long as the membership can be confirmed before an Award is made.

To apply for an Award, eligible members of the IPA should send to the Secretary (Patricia Keating, keating@humnet.ucla.edu) an email that states their name and current academic affiliation (if any), how they are eligible for an Award (student member, or other eligible category), and for student members, the name and email address of an academic supervisor. The email should be accompanied by a copy of the paper that has been accepted for TAL 2012. The deadline for applications is Wed. April 25, 2012, and decisions will be made before the end of the month. Funds for the Awards will be disbursed directly to the TAL 2012 organizers.

Professor Wolfgang Hess, who constructed and maintains ISCA's online archive of conference and other proceedings papers, volunteered to provide the same service for the IPA with past and future papers from ICPhS. The PC for the organization of ICPhS and the IPA approved this project.

In June 2011, the IPA Council received a formal request from William Barry and Juergen Trouvain to vote on the adoption of a standard IPA symbol for the central open (unrounded) vowel. This request followed publication in 2008, in JIPA 38(2), of their paper 'Do we need a symbol for a central open vowel?', along with response papers in JIPA 39(2) by Daniel Recasens and Martin Ball, and a further response from Barry and Trouvain, in JIPA 39(3).

The Council debated the issue by e-mail in 2011 and took a vote in June-July 2011. That vote was positive but not conclusive: with only 15 of 30 members voting, the vote was 8 in favor, 7 against. The Executive then decided to bring the issue again to the new Council that would begin its term in August, in hopes of a more decisive vote. Thus in Fall 2011 discussion was re-opened, and after extensive discussion the following resolution, deemed most likely of all the options that had been discussed to be supported, was put to the Council for a vote in December 2011:

I agree with the adoption of [A] (small-cap A) as the IPA symbol for the central open vowel, to be placed on the IPA chart under 'Other symbols'.

With all 30 members of the Council voting this time, the resolution was defeated: 17 no, 12 yes, 1 abstention. The IPA will therefore not be adding a symbol for this vowel to the alphabet or chart. No further resolutions were proposed to follow up on this issue at this time.

The Permanent Council for the Organisation of ICPhS received three proposals from
Paris, Scotland and Stockholm for the organisation of the 18th ICPhS. The members of the
Permanent Council voted in favour of the proposal by the Scottish consortium. The 18th
ICPhS will be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2015 organised by scholars from the Universities
of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Queen Margaret and Strathclyde.