I'm working in the project Incremental Specification of Focus and Givenness in a Discourse Context (A1) of the SFB 732  investigating the semantic-prosodic interface. We annotate both information structure and intonation, to build up corpora for statistical analyses of correlations between these two aspects. Moreover, we aim to intergrate pitch accents as well as their discourse context into a usage-based model of intonation. We examine the effects of lexical frequency and frequency of contextual configurations on pitch accent realisations. The results so far present a challenge for traditional autosegmental theories of intonation while a usage-based account predicts them correctly.

From July 2010 to October 2011 I also worked in a DFG-project on Prosodic Phrasing that investigates the status of prosodic phrasing in auditory and visual sentence processing. Prosodic phrase boundaries can influence the syntactic structure as well as the processing of argument status. One aim of the project is to identify the exact timing and functional make-up of prosody processing by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs). However, we also looked at phrasing in a corpus-phonetic approach. Specifically, we looked at the idea of prosodic balance, that is, the idea that speakers tend to produce prosodic phrases of equal structure.

Research Intrests

I'm interested in various aspects of prosody, particularly in intonation. Currently, my main interest concerns the question whether intonation can be lexicalised, and how intonation and the context in which tonal events occur can be modelled in a usage-based theory of speech production and perception. In my thesis, which I defended in June, I looked at effects of word frequency on pitch accent shape. They exist! The results fit well with the idea of Exemplar Theory, therefore I outlined how an existing exemplar model can be modified to deal with such phenomena. Now I am keen to find out more about how the production and perception of intonation works and how models of language and speech processing could integrate intonation...

• WS 03/04. Tutorium zu Intonation und Informationsstruktur (Klaus von Heusinger)
• WS 04/05. Tutorium "Labeln von Intonation" zum HS Spracherkennung (Grezegorz Dogil)
• WS 07/08. Phonetik (Schule für Logopäden, Tübingen)
• WS 08/09. Phonetik (Schule für Logopäden, Tübingen)
• WS 11/12. Parts of "Topics in Laboratory Phonology"

• Katrin Schweitzer (2012)  Frequency effects on pitch accents: towards an exemplar-theoretic approach to intonation" Ph.D. thesis Universität Stuttgart. 
• Kerstin Eckart, Arndt Riester, Katrin Schweitzer (2012):  " A Discourse Information Radio News Database for Linguistic Analysis". in: Christian Chiarcos; Sebastian Nordhoff and Sebastian Hellmann (editors), Linked Data in Linguistics. Representing and Connecting Language Data and Language Metadata pp. 65-75 Springer, Heidelberg. 

• Katrin Schweitzer, Michael Walsh, Sasha Calhoun, Hinrich Schütze (2011):  "Prosodic Variability in Lexical Sequences: Intonation Entrenches Too". Proceedings of ICPhS 2011, Hong Kong, pp.1778-1781

• Katrin Schweitzer, Sasha Calhoun, Hinrich Schütze, Antje Schweitzer, Michael Walsh (2010):  "Relative Frequency Affects Pitch Accent Realisation: Evidence for Exemplar Storage of Prosody". Proceedings of the Thirteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST) 2010 Melbourne, Australia, pp.62-65

• Katrin Schweitzer, Michael Walsh, Bernd Möbius, Hinrich Schütze (2010):  "Frequency of Occurrence Effects on Pitch Accent Realisation". Proceedings of Interspeech 2010 (Makuhari).

• Katrin Schweitzer, Arndt Riester, Michael Walsh, Grzegorz Dogil (2009):  "Pitch Accents and Information Status in a German Radio News Corpus". Proceedings of Interspeech 2009 (Brighton).

• Katrin Schweitzer, Michael Walsh, Bernd Möbius, Arndt Riester, Antje Schweitzer, Hinrich Schütze (2009):"Frequency Matters: Pitch Accents and Information Status". Proceedings of EACL 2009 (Athens).

• Michael Walsh, Katrin Schweitzer, Bernd Möbius, Hinrich Schütze (2008):  "Examining Pitch-Accent Variability from an Exemplar-Theoretic Perspective". Proceedings of Interspeech 2008 (Brisbane).

Manuals

• Katrin Schweitzer(2006):  Annotierenvon Intonation mit Wavesurfer.

Student Theses

• Katrin Schweitzer(2006):  "Intonationund Wortgebung numerischer Ausdrücke. Ein anwendungsorientiertesProduktionsexperiment". Diplomarbeit, UniversitätStuttgart.
• Katrin Schweitzer (2005): "Die Intonation von Entscheidungsfragen bei Morbus Parkinson unter Berücksichtigung des Sprechstils". Studienarbeit, Universität Stuttgart.

Member of the local organization committee of Labphon 13 (Stuttgart, 2012) 

International Cooperations

• 2012 Dermot Lynott, University of Manchester, UK
  
  
• 2010/2011 Sasha Calhoun, University of Wellington, New Zealand / University of Edinburgh, UK
  
  
• 2009 Matthew E. Adams, Uriel Cohen Priva, Stanford University, USA

 I phdid it!

And now for something completely different ...

Improtheater:

• Mosaikfabrik: Improtheater in Stuttgart und Improkurse für Kinder und Erwachsene, sowie Sprachförderung durch Improtechniken - mein Impro-Duo.
• Impro Stuttgart, ehemals "Der Kleine Grinsverkehr"  - quasi meine "Heim"-Improgruppe

Kajak:

• Kajakgruppe des Hochschulsports - da bin ich groß geworden, hab gelernt und gelehrt und jede Menge Spaß gehabt!
• Online Pegel - unverzichtbar!

Sonstiges:

• Ted-Talks