Workshop on the Processing of Prosody across Languages and Varieties (ProsLang)
Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand
29-30 November 2018
 
Call for Papers
We invite submissions for the Workshop on the Processing of Prosody across Languages and Varieties (ProsLang), to be held at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand, 29-30 November 2018.
 
The Workshop is coordinated with the 17th Speech Science & Technology Conference,
University of New South Wales, Sydney, 4-7 December 2018.
 
Aim
As an integral part of spoken language, prosody has been shown to play an important role in many speech production and perception processes. However, our knowledge of the role of prosody in speech processing draws on a relatively narrow range of (mostly closely related) languages. There is an urgent need for more psycholinguistic research looking at commonalities and differences in the use of prosodic cues in speech processing across different languages, and also different varieties of major languages. This workshop aims to bring together researchers working in this area. We are particularly interested in research on: (i) the role of prosody in semantic interpretation, including information structure; and (ii) prosody as an organisational structure for speech production and perception, including multimodal perspectives.
 
Invited Speakers
Anne Cutler, MARCS, Western Sydney University
Bettina Braun, Universität Konstanz
Jennifer Cole, Northwestern University
Janet Fletcher, University of Melbourne
Nicole Gotzner, Leibniz-ZAS Berlin
 
Topics
Topics include, but are not limited to, cross-linguistic and cross-varietal commonalities and differences in:
- the role of prosody in signalling information structure, particularly in the activation and resolution of contrast and contrastive alternatives
- the integration of prosody and morphosyntactic cues in speech comprehension, e.g. as cues to information structure
- the role of prosody in the management and interpretation of discourse
- prosodic structure as an organisational frame in speech production or perception
- links between prosodic structure and multimodal speech cues such as gesture
 
Submissions       
We invite submissions of one-page abstracts following the guidelines on the Workshop website:
https://proslang.wordpress.com/about/
 
Abstract deadline: 16 April 2018
Notification of acceptance: 30 April 2018
Workshop: 29-30 November 2018
 
Organisers
Sasha Calhoun, Paul Warren, Olcay Türk, Mengzhu Yan, VUW; Janet Fletcher, University of Melbourne
Please direct any enquiries about the Workshop to: proslangworkshop@gmail.com.