Invited speakers
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Prosody and Language contact in Creoles: Shifting from the periphery
Prosody and intonation research in Creole languages is pivotal for understanding how prosodic system changes under language contact and diversity in prosodic systems. Creole languages exhibit various forms of prosodic hybridity, providing rich ground for these kinds of questions. Despite their histories, Creoles are neither prosodic clones nor weakened versions of their input languages. Instead, they partly reflect crosslinguistic properties, challenging notions of creole exceptionalism, while displaying unique features (Steien & Yakpo 2020; River-Castillo 2009; Remijsen & Van Hueven 2005; Hyman & Schwegler 2008; Good 2004; Gooden 2022).
Prosodic variation manifests across and within Creoles, with differences in prosodic structure, tonal alignment, and pitch accent realization. Field recordings from rural Jamaican Creole (JC) suggest broad uniformity, yet geographical variation exists between Central and Eastern varieties. Trinidadian Creole exhibits ethnolinguistic variation (Gooden and Drayton 2017) and convergence (see eg. Armstrong et al 2022). Focus marking presents notable typological variation, indicating that intonational strategies permit multiple foci where well-documented morphosyntactic strategies fail.
This talks advocates for shifting Creoles from the periphery of linguistics research, underscoring the theoretical importance of understanding prosodic variation in contact situations. Finally, I will argue that such efforts must involve collaboration with scholars from Creole speaking communities, to comprehensively understand Creole prosody and its implications for linguistic theory.
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The power of voice
Whenever we hear someone speak, we take in what they are saying and how they are saying things. Additionally, we form impressions about speakers based on their voice and speech patterns. We assess their age, gender, potential profession, and whether they are introverted or extroverted. We also infer their emotional state – are they happy, sad, excited or calm? Moreover, we consider whether they are attempting to persuade us to do something. Many of these processes do not require our overt attention and happen without much effort within milliseconds. In my talk, I will provide a snapshot of the research we have conducted over the years to highlight the social intentions speakers reveal through the way they speak. How do our brains extract and process information from voices that communicate emotions, attitudes, and motivations? How can the way others talk to us affect our behaviours and wellbeing? I will also outline what we can learn from these effects and how they are relevant in the “real world” emphasizing the power of voice.
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Motor Involvement in Language Production as Reflected in Prosodic Development
The importance of the motor system in language is especially evident when spoken language is viewed from a developmental perspective. Speech motor skills are slowly consolidated during language acquisition beginning with first words. The evolving sound shape of children’s speech well into middle childhood reflects this development. In the prosodic domain, the prolonged development of speech motor skills is invoked to explain age-related changes in vowel reduction, articulation rate, and pausing during the school-age years. In this talk, these changes will be attributed to development at both the segmental and suprasegmental levels. At the segmental level, articulatory timing skills are refined while motor goals are established. Both are posited to evolve with the selection, matching, and adjustment of intrinsic perceptual-motor routines to extrinsic visuo-acoustic representations that convey meaning. At the suprasegmental level, speech motor skill development is tied to the coordination of the perceptual-motor system and conceptual-linguistic system during speaking. For example, an age-related difference in the alignment of rhythm and intonation suggests a learned coordination between segmental articulation and phrase-level meaning, while age-related differences in pausing and ingressive vocalization suggest a learned coordination between speech breathing and language planning. In short, I will argue for a motor-involved understanding of language production in this talk by presenting research on prosodic features that both informs and follows from a developmental perspective on spoken language production. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the implications of a motor-involved understanding of spoken language for psycholinguistic theory and the study of communication disorders.
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Revisiting universals of prosodic structure
A key motivation for introducing the concept of prosodic constituents in the 1980s was their ability to provide generalizations about the domains of segmental phonological processes. Recent perceptual studies have provided mounting evidence that listeners use segmental detail as cues to prosodic structure. Yet, prosodic studies on languages across the world tend to rely heavily or even exclusively on the distribution of tones to argue for prosodic constituents via proposing prosodic boundary tones at different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Here, we survey existing literature to assess what evidence has been presented for motivating prosodic constituents in different languages. We examine the relation between prosodically conditioned tonal and segmental processes, as well as evidence that lenition/weakening processes occur domain medially rather than at domain edges. We then show how understanding typological patterns can benefit from revisiting Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988)'s foundational ideas about the representation of tonal association to prosodic constituents.
