Research Statement

The goal of the Linguistic Laboratory for Speech Prosody at the University of Illinois is to understand the prosodic structure of speech and the units of prosodic encoding in human languages. Researchers in the lab explore (i) the expression of prosodic structure in the suprasegmental features of pitch, duration and intensity, and (ii) the affect of prosodic context on the spectral and durational features that encode segment identity. A major research focus is on how prosodic patterns vary across speakers and speaking styles, and how the pragmatic, syntactic and lexical functions of prosody interact to determine observed prosodic contours. An important aspect of our research is the creation of prosodically annotated speech corpora that provide data for our projects and which can be shared with other researchers interested in speech prosody and the development of computer technologies for speech processing.

Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign