The University of Michigan linguistics community was well represented at Speech Prosody 2016, which took place in Boston, May 31st through June 3rd. Speech Prosody is the only regularly occurring international conference whose focus is prosody. Hayley Heaton (PhD Student), Jiseung Kim (PhD Student), Kate Sherwood (PhD Student), Jelena Krivokapić (Assistant Professor) and Nicholas Henriksen (Assistant Professor) presented their work.

Hayley presented work performed as an extension of her Qualifying Research Paper. She looked at style-shifting in pitch movement and boundary tone as ways characters might be indexing regional identity. The poster was titled “Representing American Southern prosody in the media: Prosodic style-shifting in two Southern television characters.” Read the abstract here!

Jiseung discussed her poster which was based on her Qualifying Research Paper (QRP) study. It employed artificially modified prosody to examine accommodation in the intonation pattern of Seoul Korean dialect. The poster was titled “Prosodic accommodation in Seoul Korean accentual phrases.” Read the abstract here!

Kate discussed her work on the prosody of Southern Bobo in a poster titled “Intonational phrase boundaries in Southern Bobo Madaré”.  She investigated the phonetic correlates of final intonational phrase boundaries in Bobo, using recorded data collected during fieldwork in Burkina Faso. The poster presents an analysis of boundary tone, duration, and vowel phonation at these boundaries. Read the abstract here!

Jelena presented joint work with Mark Tiede, Martha Tyrone, and Dolly Goldenberg. Using a novel data collection method the group has developed, which allows the simultaneous collection of audio, kinematic speech and body movement, the study examines the coordination of manual and speech gestures. Read the abstract here!

Nicholas presented his work in a talk titled “Convergence effects in Spanish-English bilingual rhythm”. This talk examined the rhythmic properties of highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals and investigated the extent to which the rhythms of their first and second languages mutually influence each other. Read the abstract here!