Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody: Workshop on Prosodic Variability - U. of Illinois, Urbana Champaign; May 21-23, 2015

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Successful communication requires not just choosing the correct words and grammar, but also emphasizing the right words, pausing in appropriate locations, and using appropriate intonation and rhythm. This aspect of language is called prosody and it can convey important information about the syntactic structure of a sentence, which words in the conversation are given and new, and which aspects of the sentence are important. Understanding the rules for how prosody is used is important for building artificial speech systems that produce and understand natural language, designing interventions for individuals with speech disorders, and creating curriculum for language learners. A challenge for the field is the fact that the acoustic cues that signal which words are emphasized and where prosodic boundaries occur are highly variable, changing across both speakers and contexts. This variability is pervasive, yet researchers know very little about how the brain accommodates it. The special theme of this conference is understanding how speakers navigate pervasive variability in how prosody is realized in natural speech. Prosodic information varies significantly due to physiological and language-internal factors, dialect, idiosyncratic speaker preferences, and speech context. As a result, prosodic features lack acoustic cues that are constant across contexts. Nonetheless, human language users can readily use prosodic information in conversation. This puzzle constitutes one of the fundamental issues in prosody research. New approaches to these problems have recently emerged both in linguistic research on prosody and neighboring fields such as speech perception and recognition. The goal of this conference is to bring prosody researchers together with researchers in neighboring fields to discuss problems in prosodic variability. With invited speakers and participants from theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, phonetics, phonology, language acquisition and computer science, this meeting attempts to provide a holistic picture of prosodic variability and a venue for discussions that may lead to solving this core question in prosody research.