Greg Kochanski

Prosody Research at Bell Labs

Prosody: The study of the metrical structure of verse.

More generally, prosody is the part of human communication that is not captured by the sequence of words.

Prosody: emphasis and intonation of speech.
Pitch, amplitude, and spectral slope.
Under-articulated vs. over-articulated phonemes.
Short vs. long phonemes.
Even raised eyebrows and shrugs.

Prosody is used to mark important concepts.
It marks beginnings and endings, and gives other speakers permission to take the floor.
It marks questions.
It carries emotional content.
It has other, poorly understood, functions.

The research is important scientifically, as we have little hard knowledge about what information people communicate via prosody, and how it is done. The research also can shed light on basic questions like "How much of language is fixed by our anatomy, and how much is cultural?" and "How much of language is consciously accessible?"

Greg Kochanski and Chilin Shih presented a tutorial on prosody and prosody modeling at ICSLP2002.
Click here for recent papers.

Lucent Technologies develops speech technology for dialog systems. Prosody is an important component, allowing the systems to give more information more clearly to the human user, and also potentially allowing the dialog system to better interpret what the human wants.

Some or all of this technology is patented.

[ Papers | kochanski.org | Phonetics Lab | Oxford ]

Last Modified Sun Sep 21 18:42:23 2008

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