COVID 19

Unfortunately, I have to inform you today that we will have to cancel the TAI conference in Sonderborg, DK for this year (as well as its satellite event, 13th Nordic Prosody). This announcement makes me and the whole organization team very sad, especially because the planning process was already very advanced, including safety preparations such as masks for conference participants, and the first contributions have already been submitted.
 
However, the Danish government has decided that no major events may take place in Denmark until at least August 31, 2020, and as a public institution, we must abide by this rule. Additionally, although more and more countries seem to be managing the crisis well, making reliable travel bookings for August will most likely still remain a problem for many months. Moreover, we know from the United States and other countries that many of our colleagues won't be allowed to travel to international conferences before the end of August. Of course, we don't want to exclude anyone from the conference and/or expose anyone to unnecessary health risks.
 
A multilateral, personal exchange of ideas and feedback is essential for a conference and for fostering research in general. It is for this reason that we prefer not to carry out the TAI conference online. Instead, we -- as well as many colleagues with whom we have discussed informally -- would prefer to postpone TAI to next year.

The new preliminary date for TAI is 15-18 June (Wed-Fri), 2021, i.e. right before PaPE 2021 in Barcelona, Spain. The host of TAI remains the University of Southern Denmark, in Sonderborg, DK. We will work hard to confirm the new date for TAI as soon as possible. Please check our website for updates.
 
Regarding the submission procedure, we have closed the Easychair submission page for now. When the new date for the TAI has been fixed, we will open the submission page again in good time before the conference dates. We expect the new submission deadline to be at the beginning of 2021. In this way, everyone will still have enough time to carry out his/her studies  planned for TAI (even if they are currently interrupted due to Corona) without time pressure. Of course, all authors who have already submitted abstracts for TAI are welcome to submit their contributions elsewhere.
 
We will keep you up to date and hope for your understanding and your active participation in the TAI in 2021.We, the organizing team and I wish you all a productive and successful post-Easter period. Stay healthy and positive!

Warm and sunny regards from Southern Denmark,
Oliver Niebuhr, Jan Michalsky, Meg Zellers, Jana Neitsch, Stephanie Berger and Jonas Sikorskis.

Call for Papers

The 13th edition of the Nordic Prosody (NP) conference series is proudly hosted by Centre of Industrial Electronics (CIE) at the University of Southern Denmark on science campus Alsion, Sonderborg, Denmark (https://www.sdu.dk/en/om_sdu/institutter_centre/centre+for+industrial+elektronics). The conference will be held as a satellite event to the 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI), 16-20 August 2020. Note that there will be a discount for NP participants who sign up for both conferences!

The University of Southern Denmark (SDU) is both the third-largest and the third-oldest Danish university. Since the introduction of the ranking systems in 2012, the University of Southern Denmark has consistently been ranked as one of the top 50 young universities in the world by both the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the QS World University Rankings. The SDU is also among the top 20 universities in Scandinavia.

Nordic Prosody conferences take place every 4 years. The first one was in Lund in 1978, organized by Eva Gårding, Gösta Bruce and Robert Bannert. The 12th Nordic Prosody was in 2016 in Trondheim, Norway. The conference series focuses on the forms and functions of prosodic patterns in Nordic languages and in languages spoken around the Baltic Sea. Contributions on all the various aspects of phonetics, phonology, and speech typology are welcome. Papers presenting new corpora, methods, or devices can be submitted as well. We also encourage researchers from neighboring disciplines like (second-language) pedagogy, acoustics, human-machine interaction, and voice pathology to submit contributions to the conference.

Keynote Speakers

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- David House (KTH Stockholm, Sweden) & Gilbert Ambrazaitis (Linnaeus University, Sweden): The multimodal nature of prominence

- Wim van Dommelen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway): Interactions of segmental and prosodic parameters

- Nicolai Pharao (Copenhagen University, Denmark): Processing prosody – recognizing speakers and recognizing words

Important dates:

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31 May 2020 Abstract submission deadline
21 June 2020 Early bird registration deadline
13-15 August 2020 13th Nordic Prosody Conference, Sonderborg, Denmark

01 November 2020 Full-paper submission deadline

Registrations are made through the conference website. Abstracts as well as full papers should be sent by email to np2020@sdu.dk. More detailed information about the formatting requirements will be available on the conference website.

http://www.prosody.dk

Conference proceedings will be published in a peer-reviewed volume of  a Peter Lang book series.

                                         NEW

two special sessions at Tone and Intonation 2020 (August 16-20, SDU Sonderborg), as described below.  Please visit www.tai2020.org for more information, now including the conference keynote speakers, registration information, etc.

“Perceptual impact of foreign accents and non-standard varieties”

Marta Ortega-Llebaria (University of Pittsburgh, USA) & Jan Volín (Charles University, Czech Republic)

Suprasegmental features of speech have received well-deserved attention in the past decades. In particular, research in the f0 domain has proven especially promising since the melodic and tonal attributes of speech are perceptually salient and robust. They also convey a variety of meanings – lexical, grammatical, affective, pragmatic, conative, social – and they facilitate cerebral speech processing and comprehension. Unprecedented mobility of human populations leads to multilingual contexts that create new situations of language contact and language learning involving typologically different language varieties, many of which are still under-researched. Exactly these new linguistic situations could provide new insights into functioning of melodic and tonal phenomena and their role in, for instance, the linguistic structure, language learning and social stereotyping.

Submissions that investigate tone and intonation in relation to the following subtopics are especially welcome:

• perception and interpretation of melodic and tonal features in non-native languages and non-standard varieties

• implicit (unconscious) judgements about the users of non-native languages and non-standard varieties

• explicit (conscious) evaluations of intonation of non-native languages and non-standard varieties in different contexts, e.g., court, L2 proficiency exams, job interviews, business presentations

• emotional response to non-standard varieties and foreign-accented speech

• social consequences of speaking outside standard

• effects of unfamiliar accents into f0 processing and cognitive load

• entrainment/conversational accommodation in f0 domain

• the role of intonation in perceived fluency, accentedness, intelligibility and comprehensibility

• didactic approach to tones and tunes in foreign language teaching

After the opening overview of the field, the special session is planned to host 6 oral presentations of 15 minutes plus 5 minutes for on-spot clarifications and a number of poster presentations. The presentations will be followed by a chaired panel discussion.

“Prosody-oriented studies of social communicative speech in a digitized world”

Barbara Schuppler (TU Graz, Austria) & Wentao Gu (Nanjing Normal University, China)

In the last decade, human-human and human-machine social communicative dialogues have received more and more attention among linguists and speech scientists. For one thing, linguists study social communicative speech in order to go beyond controlled experiments and get additional insights into how spoken languages are processed in dynamic interaction. For another thing, accurate and phenomenologically rich automatic speech/speaker/emotion recognition and expressive text-to-speech synthesis systems are essential for conversational dialogue systems, as these become increasingly more interactional and social rather than solely transactional. Prosody, as the major vehicle of social functions, plays key roles in both types of studies. The investigation of prosodic variation in dialogue does not only require applying existing methods to interactional data. It also requires developing new categories of forms and functions, new modeling techniques and new sources of data/knowledge. This special session aims at bringing together phoneticians, linguists and speech technologists interested in the prosody of conversational speech. Submissions on the following topics and on different languages, including minority languages, are especially welcome:

• tools and data resources for the annotation and analysis of prosody in conversational speech

• the relationship between prosodic forms and communicative functions

• cross-linguistic and individual prosody variation in social speech communication

• co-variation of the segmental and suprasegmental characteristics in speech communication

• models of prosody in conversational speech

• prosody-oriented studies in automatic speech/speaker/emotion recognition and expressive text-to-speech synthesis

• prosody-oriented studies in human-robot interaction

The special session is able to include a maximum of 10 submissions, e.g., subdivided into 7 oral presentations of 15 minutes plus 5 minutes for discussion and 3 oral presentations that showcase new methods, tools, and corpora.

Submissions to the special sessions use the same abstract and paper templates as regular contributions to TAI, and submissions are made through the same Easychair link as for regular contributions to TAI. The deadline for all submissions is 19 April 2020.  Please see www.tai2020.org for more information.

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announcements of interest to the speech prosody research community.

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Nigel Ward, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso

CCSB 3.0408,  +1-915-747-6827

nigel@utep.edu    http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/   

We wish all of you a good start into the new lecture term.

The NP13 organizing committee,

Oliver Niebuhr, Jana Neitsch, Jan Michalsky, Meg Zellers, Stephanie Berger, Kerstin Fischer

Oliver Niebuhr

Associate Professor of Communication & Innovation

SDU Electrical Engineering

CIE - Centre for Industrial Electronics

This mail was sent through the SProSIG mailing list, which is for announcements of interest to the speech prosody research community. To subscribe/unsubscribe, mail list@sprosig.org.