The  “parsing of prosody”: implicit and explicit prosodic effects on syntactic parsing and language-specific phonetic cues

Professor
Mariapaola D’Imperio
Rutgers University, Department of Linguistics and The Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS)

The notion of parsing implies that syntactic dependency and other syntactic relations can be straightforwardly computed from the text. However, there is ample evidence showing that prosody helps disambiguate syntactic structure, even when the sentence is simply written (implicit prosody, Fodor, 1998, 2002). In this talk I will provide an overview of some effects due to implicit prosody as it relates to individual differences (Jun & Bishop 2015) and the contribution of work in laboratory phonology to current knowledge of prosodic constituency and phrasing, based on the discovery of phonetic and phonological cues in a variety of languages (Michelas & D’Imperio, 2012, 2015; D’Imperio & Michelas, 2014).

Mariapaola  D’Imperio is currently Distinguished Professor at the Department of Linguistics and the Cognitive Science Center at Rutgers University and head of the Speech and Prosody Lab. She obtained a PhD in Linguistics at the Ohio State University in 2000 and then joined the CNRS in 2001. She then obtained a position as Professor of Phonetics, Phonology and Prosody at the Department of Linguistics at Aix Marseille University, and she has been since then head of the Prosody Group at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage in Aix-en-Provence, France. She is currently Associate Editor for the Journal of Phonetics and is the President of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. Her research interests span from the intonational phonology of Romance languages, to prosody production, perception and processing.

Coordinators
Claudio Iacobini
Miriam Voghera

Laboratorio Parole
Laboratorio LabLa