Dear Speech Prosody SIG Members,

I'm pleased to announce that Speech Prosody 2026 will be in Philadelphia, organized by Jianjing Kuang and Mark Liberman.  (There were 80 votes for Shanghai, 128 for Philadelphia, and 15 had no preference.)

I’m also pleased to announce the resumption of our lecture series with a talk by Simon Roessig:

Syntagmatic prominence relations in prosodic focus marking

Lecturer: Simon Roessig (University of York, UK)

Host: Plinio A. Barbosa (Unicamp, Brazil)

Sept 24th at 1 pm (Brasilia time = UTC - 3)

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUE9pRbq9w0

Abstract: This talk is about the role of prenuclear prominences and their relation to nuclear accents in German and English. The production results (German) that I will present show that the realization of the prenuclear domain depends on whether it is focal or prefocal. The prenuclear noun is characterized by larger F0 excursions, higher F0 maxima, and longer durations when it is in broad focus than when it precedes a narrow focus. Furthermore, the realization of the prenuclear domain depends on the following focus type: The prenuclear noun is produced with smaller F0 excursions, lower F0 maxima and shorter durations before a corrective focus than before a non-corrective narrow focus. The findings suggest that the phonetic manifestation of information structure is distributed over larger prosodic domains with an inverse relationship in the syntagmatic dimension. In addition, the study contributes further evidence that continuous phonetic detail is used to encode information structural categories. An important question that arises from the production data is whether this phonetic detail can be used by listeners in perception. I will present first results from a series of perception experiments (German and English) to investigate this question.

Plan: 1. I will begin by outlining what we know about focus prosody in the nuclear and prenuclear domains. 2. I will then present findings from a production study that examines the prosody of the prenuclear domain in different types of focus. 3. These results show that there are interesting strength relations between prenuclear and nuclear prosody in the encoding of focus types. 4. I will present preliminary findings from perception experiments investigating the question whether listeners use prenuclear prominence modulations in identifying focus types. 5. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of the results and future directions.

Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair

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