Speech Prosody is the study of intonation and related phenomena, including pitch, loudness, timing, speech rate, and voicing properties. Central topics include the melody and rhythm of speech and how these contribute to meaning at the word, utterance and discourse levels. These issues are of central importance in phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and speech signal processing. Models of prosody are being applied to problems in speech synthesis, speech recognition, speech therapy, language teaching, dialog systems and many other fields.
The Speech Prosody Special Interest Group is dedicated to advancing the scientific study of speech prosody and its applications. The SIG has approximately 1100 members from over 30 countries. To join, simply send mail to list at-sign sprosig.org to be added to our roster and our low-traffic mailing list.
The SIG sponsors two conferences. Speech Prosody is the interdisciplinary conference on all aspects of speech prosody: linguistic, paralinguistic, technical, psycholinguistic, applications, and so on. SP meets in even-numbered years, typically attracts 300-400 participants, and is indexed by EI. Tone and Intonation, the recent merger of Tone and Intonation in Europe and Tonal Aspects of Languages, is focused on linguistic aspects, especially the phonological and typological. Much smaller, it it meets in odd-numbered years.
Upcoming Events
Sponsored Events
- Tone and Intonation, 1st International Conference, December 6-9, 2021, at the University of Southern Denmark and online.
- Speech Prosody 2022, May 23-26, with workshops May 27-28, Lisbon.
Other Events
- LBASS Short Courses
- Prosody & Rhythm: applications to teaching rhythm, Donna Erickson (Haskins), March 16, 19, 23 and 26.
- Prosody, variation and contact, Barbara Gili Fivela (University of Salento, Italy), April 19, 21, 23, 26 and 28
- Rhythmic analysis of languages: main challenges, Marisa Cruz (University of Lisbon), June 2, 3, 4, 7, 8 and 10
- Conference on the Foundations of Speech (SEFOS), December 2-4, 2021, University of Southern Denmark and online.