Five Best Student Paper Awards were conferred at the closing ceremony of Speech Prosody 2012. Award winners were selected on the basis of both the written papers and the oral/poster presentations. Out of the student-authored manuscripts submitted to the conference 20 candidates were first selected whose review scores (both unweighted and confidence-weighted average) of the written manuscripts were the highest before the conference. During the conference a committee composed of PAC members, local organizers and several experienced scholars who were present was constituted to give the overall scores by evaluating their oral/poster presentations at the conference with reference to the review scores of their written manuscripts. Five winners were finally selected:

• The Auditory Kappa Effect in a Speech Context 

         Alejna Brugos, Boston University, United States
         Jonathan Barnes, Boston University, United States

• The Activation of Segmental and Tonal information in Semantic Retrieval among Chinese-English Bilingual Readers 

          Chuchu Li, University of Maryland, College Park, United States
          Candise Lin, University of Maryland, College Park, United States
          Min Wang, University of Maryland, College Park, United States
          Nan Jiang, University of Maryland, College Park, United States

• The Role of Lexical Knowledge and Stress Cues in Segmentation in Second Language Learners of English 

         Candise Lin, University of Maryland, College Park, United State
         Min Wang, University of Maryland, College Park, United States

• Emotional Voice Conversion for Mandarin using Tone Nucleus Model – small corpus and high efficiency 

          Miaomiao Wang, Toshiba (China) R&D Center, China
          Miaomiao Wen, Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, United States
          Keikichi Hirose, University of Tokyo, Japan
          Nobuaki Minematsu, University of Tokyo, Japan 

• Sonority and Syllable Weight determine Tonal Association in Tashlhiyt Berber

          Timo Röttger, IfL Phonetik, University of Cologne, Germany
          Rachid Ridouane, Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (UMR 7018) CNRS/Sorbonne Nouvelle, France
          Martine Grice, IfL Phonetik, University of Cologne, Germany