This conference, to be held at Cornell University in May, 2008, will bring together researchers working on prosody from different fields, including phonetics, phonology, language processing, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics. It is co-organized by Michael Wagner (Cornell University), Duane Watson (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) and Ted Gibson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Recent developments in language research have increasingly put the spotlight on prosody, e.g. the intonational contour of utterances and the way syntactic bracketing is encoded in natural language. An improved understanding of prosody and parsing of natural speech would be important not only for a better understanding of human speech processing but also beneficial for automatic speech recognition and synthesis.
Leading research questions include the following. What type of information about syntax, semantics, and context is reflected in prosody? How much of that information can a listener retrieve from the signal? How does this information facilitate language processing in online conversations? What do disfluencies and pauses in production reveal about the cognitive processes involved in planning and producing prosodic structure? How incremental is the planning and production of prosody, and what does it reveal about incremental speech production more generally? The conference is intended to be a venue for exchanging ideas and methodologies, for learning about different perspectives, and most importantly for stimulating discussion and inspiring new ideas, projects, and collaborations. To ensure a broader impact on the field, the results of the conference will be published in a peer-reviewed special issue of the journal "Language and Cognitive Processes.".
