Measuring and Modeling Prosodic Variation

Petra Wagner

Universität Bielefeld,Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft

Optimization-based models view phonetic (including prosodic) variation as the outcome of a process balancing production effort and perceptual clarity, or rather, listener and a speaker-oriented constraints. In my talk, I will re-assess a number of empirical studies we carried out in the past year, and see how far their outcomes can be reinterpreted from an optimization-based account. These studies touch upon typological aspects of prosody production, aspects of stylistic variation and aspects of integrating multimodal information. Lastly, I will discuss how we can assess how listeners may deal with this balancing of production effort and perceptual clarity and how these insights may inform speech technological applications.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Ingmar Steiner.