Candidates
The following 7 individuals, listed alphabetically, are the candidates to be Officers of the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group, 2024 - 2026.
Plinio A. Barbosa
My interest to be in the SproSIG board are: (1) to contribute to provide a fruitful and friendly environment during the Speech Prosody conferences, (2) to contribute in efforts to stimulate education in prosody research (resources, tutorials, remote courses, lectures), (3) to continue the SproSIG lecture series (remote lectures on speech prosody), (4) to be a liaison between students’ needs in the area and senior researchers.
Affliation: University of Campinas, Brazil
Aoju Chen
Aoju Chen, Chair of English linguistics at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, is a leading researcher in speech prosody and a pioneer in interdisciplinary research on prosody acquisition in a first and second language. She is the holder of a number of major grants for research on prosody and prosodic development. Her recent research bridges speech prosody with language development, foetal learning and neuroscience, and explores the interaction between innate biases in prosodic production and perception with input-driven learning mechanisms in early prosodic development.
A dedicated SproSIG member and current elected officer, Aoju frequently presents work in SproSIG events and was a keynote speaker at Speech Prosody 2016. Her work is also well-known outside the SproSIG and is a regular invited speaker both nationally and internationally.
If re-elected, she will continue her efforts in promoting interdisciplinary research on prosody and prosodic development. Furthermore, She will join-force with co-officers to advocate for free open access publishing of work on language prosody. Also, she will take action to facilitate multi-lab initiatives to tackle issues such as replicability and small sample size, and new questions relying on cross-linguistic insights in the field of speech prosody.
Affliation: Utrecht University, the Netherlands
nominated by Martine Grice
Martine Grice
As an officer of the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group, Martine Grice brings extensive experience organizing conferences and running of scholarly societies (past president of the Association of Laboratory Phonology, past councillor of the IPA, and founder-member of SProsIG and PaPE). She is a strong voice in supporting early career researchers, making sure they are given opportunities to actively participate in the Speech Prosody conference (reduced fees, grants/travel awards, best student paper awards). As editor of the Language Science Press book series "Studies in Laboratory Phonology" and board member of the Free Journal Network she is a dedicated advocate of free and fair open access publishing. She is also an active participant in Speech Prosody conferences having given a keynote in the Lisbon conference in 2022. Her research on prosody is interdisciplinary and covers a wide range of languages. This breadth will continue to facilitate liaison with other disciplines and societies.
Affiliation: University of Cologne
Nominated by Sónia Frota
Xiaoming Jiang
Dr. Jiang has been an active participant at Speech Prosody conferences in 2014 (Dublin), 2018 (Poznan), and 2024 (Leiden). At the 2018 conference, he co-hosted a special session entitled "Prosody in Social Contexts" which underscored his vision for advancing research in this area, and he has spearheaded a formal bid to host SP2026. Dr. Jiang has conducted extensive fMRI and EEG studies on speech prosody, particularly focusing on emotive expressions and communication, and his recent work has provided new insights about mechanisms underlying speech prosody of confidence. These studies have shed significant light on the neural processing of speech prosody in a variety of interpersonal contexts. This innovative work has been widely recognized, including an award he received for Best Paper published in Speech Communication (2017-2022) from the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP). Dr. Jiang’s high international stature, creativity, and influence on the field of Speech Prosody cannot be doubted.
If elected officer to SProSIG, Dr. Jiang’s vision is to enhance interdisciplinary collaboration to advance the study of prosody in human cognition and artificial intelligence. He aims to strengthen SProSIG’s international presence, promote global research exchanges, support emerging scholars, and expand the SProSIG community's involvement in linguistics and cognitive science.
Affliations: Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China
nominated by Marc D. Pell and Hongwei Ding
Links: Google Scholar page, Researchgate page, c.v.
Katalin Mády
My research includes both micro- and macroprosody: vowel quantity in production and perception; stress, accent and focus realisation; acoustic modelling of intonation patterns. While most of my studies are based on Hungarian, other research includes comparative and monolingual studies on German, English, Czech, Slovak and the endangered Uralic language Tundra Nenets. Research on lesser studied languages will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of prosodic typology in general.
As an officer for SProSIG, I would like to expand the visibility of the group's activities and reach out for researchers who might not be aware of the SProSIG mailing list and the online lecture series. This includes scholars who do not (regularly) attend the Speech Prosody conferences for various reasons (lack of time or funding). Some of them might want to be informed about other prosodic workshops and conferences which can serve as a platform for an exchange with other researchers working on the prosody of their target languages or similar ones. If elected, I would be happy to participate in keeping up the mailing list both in terms of memberships and announcements.
Affliation: HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary
Links: homepage, project page, publications page
Jürgen Trouvain
Jürgen Trouvain served in several important functions for the communities of phonetics and prosody. This includes activities as an editor of special issues ("Pauses in Speech" in "Languages" 2023; "Segmental, prosodic and fluency features in phonetic learner corpora" in "the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research" 2017) and edited volumes ("Voice Attractiveness" 2020; "Non-Native Prosody" 2007).
He has a special expertise as organiser of conferences and workshops ("International Congress of Phonetic Sciences" 2007; "Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung" 2017, "Laughter and other Non-Verbal Vocalisations in Speech" 2007-2015; "History of Speech Communication Research" 2015, 2019; "Speech Respiration" 2020, 2022; "Feedback in Pronunciation Training" 2015).
He also serves as the secretary of the SIG of "History in Speech Communication Research" (since 2011), supported by ISCA and IPA.
His relationship to the "Speech Prosody" conference is visible as an invited speaker in Dublin 2014, as organiser of a satellite workshop in Leiden 2024 ("Prosodic features of language learners' fluency") and as an author (2014-24).
Events like "Speech Prosody" require the management of a huge amount of organisational details at various levels. Colleagues are busy besides their normal duties over many months. As an SProSIG board member, Jürgen Trouvain can bring in his know-how regarding conference and workshop organisation.
Affliation: Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
nominated by Bernd Möbius and Katharina Zahner-Ritter
Nigel Ward
The speech prosody research community is growing and thriving, but we face challenges. We need to keep the Speech Prosody conferences inclusive and cohesive, while accommodating the growing activity in our field. We need continue to value contributions of all kinds: descriptive and empirical, of course, but also new and improved theories, models, methods, and tools. We need to balance interest-driven basic research and relevance to speech technology, language learning and teaching, speech pathology, and other applied fields. My vision for the research community to become more visible, more connected, and more effective. The Special Interest Group officers should aim to facilitate this.
For the past six years I have served the SIG as Chair, and have also managed the website, run the mailing list, and led in liaising with the organizers of the conferences and with our parent organization, ISCA. For the next two years, I hope to be able to hand off some of the responsibilities to new officers, preparing them to fully take over when the current officers reach the four-term limit in 2026. However I remain willing to continue my practice of doing whatever needs to be done.
Affiliation: University of Texas at El Paso