Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody

这次会议将于2008年5月在康奈尔大学举行，届时将汇集来自不同领域的韵律研究人员，包括语音学、音系学、语言处理、神经语言学和计算语言学。它是由康奈尔大学的迈克尔·瓦格纳、伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳香槟分校的杜安·沃森和麻省理工学院的泰德·吉布森共同组织的。近年来语言研究的进展越来越多地关注韵律，例如话语的语调轮廓和自然语言中的句法编码方式。提高对自然语音的韵律和句法分析的理解，不仅对于更好地理解人类的语音处理过程，而且对于语音自动识别和合成都是非常重要的。主要的研究问题包括以下几个。韵律反映了什么类型的句法、语义和语境信息？监听者可以从信号中检索到多少信息？这些信息如何促进在线对话中的语言处理？语篇中的不流畅和停顿揭示了计划和生成韵律结构所涉及的认知过程的什么？韵律的计划和生产是如何递增的，它揭示了更普遍的递增语音生产的什么？会议旨在成为一个交流思想和方法、学习不同观点的场所，最重要的是鼓励讨论和启发新的想法、项目和合作。为确保对实地产生更广泛的影响，会议成果将发表在《语言和认知过程》期刊的同行评议特刊上。

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.".