Prof. Jennifer Cole, Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University gave a talk on 3rd September on Standing out in speech: Prosodic prominence in speech production and perception.
Across languages, it is often observed that variation in the prosodic form of utterances relates to information structure (IS) – words that convey new information or focus are distinguished from words that are discourse-given through the phonological specification of prosodic features and/or their phonetic implementation. Yet decades of research on the prosodic encoding of IS across languages leaves fundamental questions unanswered. The first part of her talk surveys the phenomena from diverse languages that demonstrate a link between prosody and IS, considering the range of IS meaning distinctions (e.g., new vs. given information, focus) and their expression in terms of sentence stress, phonological pitch accent and acoustic prosodic parameters (e.g., F0, duration, intensity), across languages. The second part of her talk focuses on speaker variation in the production of prosody, and the reflection of that variation in listeners perception of IS meaning. Evidence from prominence perception studies of English, French, Hindi, Spanish, and Russian shows that listeners perceive prominence in unscripted speech not only in relation to acoustic prosodic cues, but also as a function of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic context, and calibrated by speech style. Additional evidence shows differences among individual listeners in the weighting of acoustic cues to prosody, and differences in the strength of association between prosodic expressions and particular types of IS meaning with many different prosodic expressions accepted as instances of broad (new-information) focus, and narrower criteria for prosodic expressions accepted as marking contrastive focus. The experimental evidence reveals pervasive variation in prosodic expression and its interpretation. Implications for the acoustic modeling of prosody and its relationship to IS meaning will be discussed as motivation for the development of a novel, information-theoretic model of the link between sound and meaning.
Prof. Cole has served as elected chair of the AAAS Section Z [Linguistics and Language Science], on the National Research Council Board on Behavioral, Cognitive & Sensory Sciences, on the Board of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and on the Board of the Linguistic Society of America. She was the founding editor for the journal Laboratory Phonology (2000-2005), and was on the editorial board for Language, Phonology, and the Oxford Research Reviews in Linguistics.