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单词和语法，还需要强调正确的单词，在适当的位置暂停，使用适当的语调和节奏。语言的这一方面被称为韵律，它可以传达关于句子的句法结构的重要信息，对话中哪些单词是给定的和新的，以及句子的哪些方面是重要的。理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、为语言障碍患者设计干预措施以及为语言学习者创建课程都很重要。该领域面临的一个挑战是，信号强调哪些单词和韵律边界发生的声音线索是高度可变的，在说话者和上下文中都会发生变化。这种可变性是普遍存在的，但研究人员对大脑如何适应这种可变性知之甚少。这次会议的特别主题是理解演讲者如何在自然语音中实现韵律的普遍变化中导航。韵律信息受生理因素和语言内部因素、方言、说话人的特殊偏好和言语语境的影响而有显著差异。因此，韵律特征缺乏跨上下文不变的声学线索。尽管如此，人类语言使用者可以很容易地在对话中使用韵律信息。这个难题构成了韵律研究的基本问题之一。近年来，在韵律语言学和语音感知与识别等邻近领域的研究中出现了解决这些问题的新方法。这次会议的目的是将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、音韵学、语言习得和计算机科学的演讲者和参与者，试图提供一个韵律变化的整体图景，并提供一个讨论的场所，可能导致解决韵律研究中的这个核心问题。

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.