UK-South Korea Prosody Research Network

We will set up a new international Prosody Research Network, with the founding core members based in the UK and South Korea. Prosody refers to the musical aspects of speech, such as melody, rhythm and timing. These features of spoken language are crucial information sources in human interaction, as can be seen from the misunderstandings that frequently arise when communication is purely via the text modality.

Prosody helps listeners to make inferences about a speaker's identity, including their regional or national background, and is critical in judgements we make about a speaker's emotional state. The audible differences between speakers who are happy, sad, tired or scared are strongly based on melody and rate of speech, so that we often judge a person's attitude to us more by prosody than by their actual words.

In addition, prosody conveys linguistically important information, distinguishing word-pairs such as 'incite' and 'insight', and sometimes indicating whether the same phrase is intended as a question or a statement. Moreover, the most important words in any utterance are often marked prosodically, with higher pitch and greater duration pointing us to the new or most relevant information.

Speech prosody is an early-acquired and essential part of the language. Thus, research on prosody has implications for understanding and supporting language acquisition, for foreign language teaching, for developing more sophisticated speech recognition and synthesis computer systems - capable, for example, of understanding and conveying emotion - and even for the diagnosis of neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis.

Much previous research, on all aspects of speech prosody, has been carried out on a small number of languages, however, in particular on the Germanic and Romance languages of Western Europe and on Chinese and Japanese of East Asia. In order to fully understand the human use of prosody in speech production and understanding, we need to carry out research with much wider groups of speakers, from more diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Only then can we develop reliable models of how the human mind generates and processes the melody, rhythm and timing of speech.

The project members will lead the network as researchers specialising in speech acoustics, the sound systems of language, global varieties of English, atypical speech development, auditory perception, human memory and cognition, neurolinguistics, and the sociological aspects of language. The network will provide opportunities for researchers to productively collaborate on innovative interdisciplinary projects using behavioural and neurophysiological methods.

Early career researchers will benefit from training in advanced methods of prosody research and data analysis, with many mentoring opportunities offered by the network. The outcomes of our collaborations will improve tools and methods for prosody research, offer a new theoretical basis for foreign language teaching and assessment, provide scientific models of speech prosody for speech technology and engineering, and offer new insights into the diagnosis and treatment of speech and language disorders.