2025 Programming on Prosody and Suprasegmentals
The Association for Laboratory Phonology is excited to announce the 2025 ALP off-season programming, which is a series of events on prosody and suprasegmentals. This series is headlined by the 2024 ALP Honorary Member, Dr. Fernanda Ferreira, a psycholinguist whose research contributions on phrasing have substantially improved the ALP community’s scholarship. To continue the off-season programming’s methodological threads, the second event is a workshop by Dr. Constantijn Kaland on Contour Clustering. The series wraps up with a lecture by Dr. Jeremy Steffman, whose talk highlights the importance of prosody for everyone in the ALP research community.
You can register for each event individually through the links provided below. The ALP community spans the globe, and please note the times of the events were scheduled to align with the needs of the presenters. All events will be recorded and made available to members of the ALP community. If you are unable to attend the event as scheduled, but would like to learn from the presentations, please register and you will be notified when the recording is available.
If you have any questions about this series, please email Molly Babel (molly.babel@ubc.ca).
Talk 1: 'Rethinking Prosodic Phrasing' by Dr. Fernanda Ferreira
July 16 at 10am PDT
Abstract:
Psycholinguists and speech scientists have traditionally assumed a tight link between syntactic and prosodic boundaries, leading to processing theories that emphasize the use of acoustic cues to facilitate the learning and processing of syntactic structure. A limitation of this work is that it is based on speakers’ rehearsed readings of artificial sentences specifically designed to test psycholinguistic hypotheses. In our current work, we instead use unrehearsed scene descriptions elicited under a variety of conditions and from different populations. These descriptions are run through an automatic parser (spaCy) and the Wavelet Prosody Tookit to quantify strength of syntactic and prosodic boundaries. We find that almost half the words speakers produce show a mismatch between prosody and syntax: a strong syntactic boundary is associated with a weak prosodic boundary, and vice versa. Contrary to the assumptions of most psycholinguistic theories as well as most studies of prosody that require speakers to read prepared stimuli, we observe only a moderate alignment between prosodic and syntactic structure. We hypothesize that prosodic phrasing is largely based on variations in resource availability associated with planning during language production. Current work is exploring similar issues in child-directed speech.
Registration: Please log in at the bottom of this page (if you are not already logged in to your ALP member account) and register here.
Workshop: 'Contour Clustering: an introduction and demonstration' by Dr. Constantijn Kaland
July 31 at 10-11:30am CEST
Abstract:
In recent years, there is an increased interest in the application of cluster analysis in the analysis of f0 contours. Studies have used this technique to explore previously under-documented languages and to confirm and refine intonation theory of well-studied languages. Cluster analysis is useful, because it is able to group contours based on their numerical similarity, facilitating the analysis and interpretation of f0 variation. The R Shiny application 'Contour Clustering' primarily focuses on f0 contours, and recently underwent a complete makeover with several new options added. In the workshop you will be given a general introduction to cluster analysis applied to intonation and a demonstration. The demonstration will show the main functions of the application using example data. There will be an interactive session for which participants are invited to have their own data ready for analysis: speech data (.wav/.mp3) and (partial) annotations on at least one interval tier (.TextGrid). For more information, downloads and literature please refer here: https://constantijnkaland.github.io/contourclustering/
Registration: Please log in at the bottom of this page (if you are not already logged in to your ALP member account) and register here.
Talk 2: 'Prosody in spoken language comprehension: The view from segmental perception' by Dr. Jeremy Steffman
August 7 at 3pm BST
Abstract:
Prosody has been shown to be important for many aspects of spoken language understanding. This talk is about one less-studied aspect: the influence of phrase-level prosodic organisation on listeners’ perception of segmental detail. Phrasal prosody (boundaries, prominences) and segmental categories are often studied as separate dimensions in speech production and perception. However, in the speech signal itself, prosodic and segmental information are intertwined, raising the question of how listeners extract both types of representations in spoken language comprehension. This talk will explore one way they interact, testing the role of prosodic information in guiding listeners’ perception of segmental categories. Examining vowel contrasts in American English and stop contrasts in Seoul Korean, we will investigate the ways in which prosody influences both what listeners perceive and how they process speech. The what question will be addressed through the lens of observed compensatory shifts in perception, which reflect an apparent detailed sensitivity to speech production patterns. The how question will be addressed in light of possible benefits of prosodic prominence in cue processing, including in challenging listening environments, and in the way in which a prosodic parse of the signal interacts with other contextual influences, specifically speech rate effects. The picture that emerges from these results will be discussed in terms of the need to consider prosody more thoroughly as influencing speech processing at various levels, and with ruminations on future lines of research.
Registration: Please log in at the bottom of this page (if you are not already logged in to your ALP member account) and register here.