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. Prosody is important in phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and speech signal processing, and models of prosody are being applied to problems in speech synthesis, speech therapy, language teaching, dialog systems and many other fields.
The Speech Prosody Special Interest Group has approximately 1100 members from over 30 countries. The SIG is dedicated to advancing the scientific study of speech prosody and its applications. It does this through
- The SProSIG mailing list, with typically one or two announcements a month. To join, send mail to list at-sign sprosig.org to be added to the list and our membership roster.
- The Speech Prosody conference, 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 around 300 participants, and is indexed by EI.
- The SProSIG virtual lecture series, featuring an hour of lecture and discussion most months. Lecturers alternate between distinguished and rising researchers.
- Liaison with other events and groupings, including the Tone and Intonation conference series, which, with typically around 200 attendees, meets odd-numbered years.
Upcoming Events
Upcoming Sponsored Event
- Speech Prosody 2026, Philadelphia, USA, May 26-29.
Other Upcoming Events
- Prosody in Languages of the Middle East at PaPE, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, June 25, 2025
- Prosody of Uralic Languages at CIFU, Tartu, Estonia, August 18-23, 2025.
- Speech Synthesis Workshop, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, August 24-26, 2025.
- Prosody at the Crossroads of Disciplinary Pathways, Grenoble, May 21-22, 2026.
Other Recent Events
- Tone and Intonation (TAI 2025), Munich, Germany, May 16-18, 2025.
SProSIG Lecture Series
- TBD. Simon Wehrle, September 2025
- TBD, Christelle Portes, October 2025
- TBD, Lieke van Maastrict, November 2025