Prosody is the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, which encodes information that is not encoded by the syntax or words of an utterance. Prosody is critical for parsing speech, constructing syntactic structure, and building a representation of the conversational discourse model, among other linguistic functions.
In 2008, researchers from linguistics, psychology and computer science gathered at the inaugural meeting of the conference on Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody at Cornell University. The papers in this volume represent the cutting edge of the prosody work presented at that conference.
The articles in this special issue tackle a number of key questions: What type of information about syntax, semantics, and context is reflected in prosody and intonation? How much of that information can a listener retrieve from the signal? How does this information facilitate language processing in online conversations? How can this information be used to parse corpora, and how can corpora be used to test theories on prosody?
M. Wagner, D.G. Watson, Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody: A Review. A. Anttila, M. Adams, M. Speriosu, The Role of Prosody in the English Dative Alternation. J. Barnes, N. Veilleux, A. Brugos, S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, Turning Points, Tonal Targets, and the English L-phrase Accent. B. Braun, L. Tagliapietra, The Role of Contrastive Intonation Contours in the Retrieval of Contextual Alternatives. M. Breen, E. Fedorenko, M. Wagner, E. Gibson, Acoustic Correlates of Information Structure. S. Calhoun, How Does Informativeness Affect Prosodic Prominence? J. Cole, Y. Mo, S. Baek, The Role of Syntactic Structure in Guiding Prosody Perception with Ordinary Listeners and Everyday Speech. A. Isaacs, D.G. Watson, Accent Detection is a Slippery Slope: Direction and Rate of F0 Change Drives Listeners’ Comprehension. S.A. Jun, The Implicit Prosody Hypothesis and Overt Prosody in English. J. Snedeker, E. Casserly, Is it All Relative? Effects of Prosodic Boundaries on the Comprehension and Production of Attachment Ambiguities. I. Stoyneshka-Raleva, J.D. Fodor, E. Fernandez, Phoneme Restoration Methods Reveal Prosodic Influences on Syntactic Processing.
Duane G. Watson, Univeristy of Illinois, USA Michael Wagner, McGill University, USA Edward Gibson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
