Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody

这次会议将于2008年5月在康奈尔大学举行，将汇集来自不同领域的韵律研究人员，包括语音学、音韵学、语言处理、神经语言学和计算语言学。它是由Michael Wagner（康奈尔大学）、Duane Watson（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳香槟分校）和Ted Gibson（麻省理工学院）共同组织的。近年来语言研究的发展越来越多地关注韵律，如话语的语调轮廓和自然语言中句法括号的编码方式。提高对自然语音的韵律和解析的理解不仅对更好地理解人类语音处理非常重要，而且对语音自动识别和合成也很有帮助。主要的研究问题包括以下几点。韵律中反映了什么类型的语法、语义和上下文信息？监听者能从信号中获取多少信息？这些信息如何促进在线对话中的语言处理？生产中的不流畅和停顿揭示了与计划和生产韵律结构有关的认知过程？韵律的规划和产生有多渐进，它揭示了更普遍的渐进式语音产生的什么？会议旨在成为交流思想和方法，学习不同观点的场所，最重要的是促进讨论和激发新想法，项目和合作。为了确保在该领域产生更广泛的影响，会议的结果将发表在《语言与认知过程》杂志的同行评议特刊上。

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.".