Conference

Prosodic variation across languages: The state-of-the-art in comparative prosodic research

Date

Friday 14 September 2018 - Saturday 15 September 2018

Location

Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden

About

This workshop will involve invited talks and poster presentations of students from and outside LUCL.

The main goal of the workshop is to bring together phoneticians, phonologists and psycholinguists that are interested in prosodic diversity. The workshop will have a special emphasis on prosodic variation across languages. Main topics/questions: 

• Acquisition of diverse prosodic systems
  • How do babies acquire melody together with grammar?
  • How do the phonetic and phonological properties of L1-prosody affect the 
acquisition of L2-prosody?
  • What are the main differences between the mental representation of intonation in infants, adults, and non-native speakers?
• Phonology and phonetics of prosodic rhythm and melodies
• Typology of tone and intonation
  • What are the recent advancements on the interfaces of tones with accent/stress/intonation? 
• Prosody in natural language processing

  • How do speakers of different languages perceive pitch in the acoustic signal?
  • What are the general and language-specific signal-driven cues that are employed in the recognition of discrete words/phrases? 

• Cross-linguistic diversity in the syntax-prosody interface
  • Are prosodic structures a reflection of syntactic?
  • What are the sources of mismatches between syntactic and prosodic constituency? 
• Cross-cultural communicative effects of sentence prosody
  • To what extent does paralinguistic information affect the prosodic structuring 
of an utterance? 
  • What is the phonological basis for rhythm alignment?
  • What are the acoustic correlates of stress across languages?
  • What kind of cross-linguistic differences do melodies in typologically different languages exhibit?
  • What is the role of tonal composition in attributing certain pragmatic meanings to certain strings of tones and how does that vary across languages and cultures?

Poster session

Another objective of this workshop is to bring together the junior researchers of Leiden University with these experts. We plan to organize a poster session, to which we will invite Master’s/PhD students from Leiden University. Invitations will be open to any students whose research is related to prosody, and applications will be accepted unconditionally. The poster session will provide a unique opportunity for students who work on prosody to receive feedback from the experts in the field. Additionally, it will enable them to expand their international network.

We still accept posters!

If you would like to present a poster related to stress/tone/intonation/prosody just let us know by sending an email to [e-mail]

Programme

You may find the programme here.