I'm interested in various aspects of prosody, particularly inintonation. Currently, my main interest concerns the question whetherintonation can be lexicalised, and how intonation and the context inwhich tonal events occur can be modelled ina usage-based theory of speech production and perception.In my thesis, which I defended in June, I looked at effects of wordfrequency on pitch accent shape. They exist! The results fit well withthe idea of Exemplar Theory, therefore I outlined how an existingexemplar model can be modified to deal with such phenomena.Now I am keen to find out more about how the production and perceptionof intonation works and how models of language and speech processingcould integrate intonation...
I'm working in the project
From July 2010 to October 2011 I also worked in a DFG-projecton Prosodic Phrasing that investigates the status of prosodicphrasing in auditory and visual sentence processing. Prosodic phraseboundaries can influence the syntactic structure as well as theprocessing of argument status. One aim of the project is to identifythe exact timing and functional make-up of prosody processing bymeasuring event-related potentials (ERPs). However, we also looked atphrasing in a corpus-phonetic approach. Specifically, we looked at theidea of prosodic balance, that is, the idea that speakers tend toproduce prosodic phrases of equal structure.