Call for Papers: Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody

The conference on Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody will be held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York on April 11-13, 2008. The goal of this conference is to bring together researchers working on prosody from different fields, including phonetics, phonology, semantics, language processing, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics. It is co-organized by Michael Wagner (Cornell University), Duane Watson (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) and Ted Gibson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Recent developments in language research have increasingly put the spotlight on prosody, e.g. the intonational, rhythmic, and phrasing of natural language. An improved understanding of prosody and parsing of natural speech is important not only for a better understanding of human speech processing but also for automatic speech recognition and synthesis. Leading research questions include: What type of information about syntax, semantics, and context is reflected in prosody? How much of that information can a listener retrieve from the signal? How does this information facilitate language processing in online conversations? What do disfluencies and pauses in production reveal about the cognitive processes involved in planning and producing prosodic structure? How incremental is the planning and production of prosody, and what does it reveal about incremental speech production more generally?

This conference is intended as a venue for exchanging ideas and methodologies, for learning about different perspectives, and most importantly, for stimulating discussion and inspiring new ideas, projects, and collaborations beyond the trodden paths. The conference will consist of spoken paper presentations and a poster session, both of which will cover experimental and theoretical topics in prosody. Papers and posters will be selected from submitted abstracts, and additional presentations will be made by invited speakers. The results of the conference will be published in a special issue of the journal Language and Cognitive Processes.

Student Travel Stipends

There will be 20 travel stipends for student participants for up to $300. Preference will be given to presenters. Information about how to apply for a travel stipend will be posted closer to the conference date.

Invited Speakers:

Charles Clifton, Jennifer Cole, Laura Dilley, Dan Jurafsky, Janet Fodor, Shari Speer, Mark Steedman, Karsten Steinhauer, Sun-Ah Jun, Mats Rooth, and Elisabeth Selkirk


Submission Deadline: Friday, January 18, 2008

Submissions for all presentations must be submitted by this date. Notifications regarding acceptance/rejection will be made in late February.

Abstract Guidelines:

Submissions for both posters and presentations must be made as abstracts. Abstracts must not exceed 500 words. Fifteen lines, which are not included in the word count, may be used to present examples and references. Abstracts must be submitted via the conference website: http://ling.cornell.edu/prosody08

Conference Support:

Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody is supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. 0642660, by the Cognitive Science program at Cornell University, and by the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University.

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the organizers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Please direct all inquiries to: prosody08 at gmail dot com