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Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody (ETAP) 3
This year's conference on prosodic variability will be held on May 28-30 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
 
One fundamental and yet unresolved issue in prosodic research is the question of how listeners identify prosodic representations in the spoken input. The primary source of difficulty is pervasive variability in how prosody is used in natural speech. Prosodic information is encoded by a range of phonetic features such as fundamental frequency (F0), duration, and intensity. All of these features vary significantly due to physiological and language-internal factors such as declination or downstepping between pitch accents, as well as more socially conditioned factors such as gender or dialectal features. Researchers, however, disagree largely on how listeners deal with such variability.
 
The lack of invariance between the acoustic signal and the underlying linguistic representations is a more general problem in language comprehension. Investigating the adaptive nature of prosodic processing thus constitutes part of a larger-scale emerging paradigm for understanding comprehension as an integration of linguistic information and contextually- and socially-conditioned expectations. Since prosody serves as a channel for social and pragmatic information, investigation of prosodic variability might provide a new window into existing behavioral and computational theories of adaptation and human language processing.
 
Questions regarding prosodic variability can be best addressed through integrating results and insights from linguistic and psycholinguistic work specializing in speech prosody, as well as those in the fields of phonetics, computational linguistics, and sociolinguistics. The goal of this conference is to bring together researchers and students from these different disciplines to address the following questions:
 
  • In what ways is prosody variable? What computational and theoretical challenges does the prosodic variability give rise to? 

 

  • Why and how does the realization of prosody vary across speakers and contexts?

 

  • What roles do communication and contextually-conditioned expectations play in navigating prosodic variability?

 

We believe that cross-talk between different fields will help provide a common knowledge base across different domains and advance theoretical and methodological development in prosody research.

 

There will be 6 invited talks and 18 contributions selected from submitted abstracts. We will also have two poster sessions. Click here for the schedule

Organizers
  • ​Duane Watson (UIUC)

  • Chigusa Kurumada (Univ. of Rochester)

  • Michael Wagner (McGill)

News

Registration for the conference is open. Click here to register. 

 

If you have not yet submitted your revised abstract, please email it to etapthree@gmail.com as soon as possible. 

Invited speakers
  • Naomi Feldman (Univ. of Maryland)

 

  • Tyler Kendall (Univ. of Oregon)

 

  • Mark Liberman (UPenn)

 

  • Morgan Sonderegger (McGill)

 

  • Alice Turk (Univ. of Edinburgh)

 

  • Jennifer Cole and Tim Mahrt (UIUC)

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