Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody: Workshop on Prosodic Variability - U. of Illinois, Urbana Champaign; May 21-23, 2015

成功的交流不仅需要选择正确的词汇和语法，还需要强调正确的词汇，在适当的位置停顿，使用适当的语调和节奏。 语言的这个方面被称为韵律，它可以传达有关句子句法结构的重要信息，对话中的哪些单词是给定的和新的，以及句子的哪些方面是重要的。 了解韵律的使用规则对于构建产生和理解自然语言的人工语音系统，为言语障碍患者设计干预措施以及为语言学习者创建课程非常重要。 该领域面临的一个挑战是，声学线索，信号的单词被强调，韵律边界出现的高度可变的，在两个扬声器和上下文的变化。 这种变化是普遍存在的，但研究人员对大脑如何适应它知之甚少。本次会议的特别主题是了解演讲者如何在自然语音中实现韵律的普遍变化。由于生理和语言内部因素、方言、说话者的特殊偏好和言语语境等因素，韵律信息的差异很大。因此，韵律特征缺乏跨上下文恒定的声学线索。然而，人类语言使用者可以很容易地在会话中使用韵律信息。这一问题是韵律学研究的基本问题之一。近年来，在语言学的韵律研究以及语音感知和识别等领域出现了解决这些问题的新方法。这次会议的目的是把韵律研究人员与邻近领域的研究人员聚集在一起，讨论韵律变异性的问题。 本次会议邀请了来自理论语言学、心理语言学、社会语言学、语音学、音系学、语言习得和计算机科学的演讲者和参与者，试图提供韵律变异的整体图景，并为可能导致解决韵律研究中这一核心问题的讨论提供场所。

Successful communication requires not just choosing the correct words and grammar, but also emphasizing the right words, pausing in appropriate locations, and using appropriate intonation and rhythm. This aspect of language is called prosody and it can convey important information about the syntactic structure of a sentence, which words in the conversation are given and new, and which aspects of the sentence are important. Understanding the rules for how prosody is used is important for building artificial speech systems that produce and understand natural language, designing interventions for individuals with speech disorders, and creating curriculum for language learners. A challenge for the field is the fact that the acoustic cues that signal which words are emphasized and where prosodic boundaries occur are highly variable, changing across both speakers and contexts. This variability is pervasive, yet researchers know very little about how the brain accommodates it. The special theme of this conference is understanding how speakers navigate pervasive variability in how prosody is realized in natural speech. Prosodic information varies significantly due to physiological and language-internal factors, dialect, idiosyncratic speaker preferences, and speech context. As a result, prosodic features lack acoustic cues that are constant across contexts. Nonetheless, human language users can readily use prosodic information in conversation. This puzzle constitutes one of the fundamental issues in prosody research. New approaches to these problems have recently emerged both in linguistic research on prosody and neighboring fields such as speech perception and recognition. The goal of this conference is to bring prosody researchers together with researchers in neighboring fields to discuss problems in prosodic variability. With invited speakers and participants from theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, phonetics, phonology, language acquisition and computer science, this meeting attempts to provide a holistic picture of prosodic variability and a venue for discussions that may lead to solving this core question in prosody research.