Jennifer Cole
Unlocking Prosody: Discovering Structured Variation and Rich Context Effects
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Jennifer Cole
Jennifer Cole
Jennifer Cole did her PhD in Linguistics from M.I.T., and taught at Yale and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign prior to joining Northwestern University in 2016. She is an elected Fellow of the AAAS, and the International Speech Communication Association, and was founding Editor of Laboratory Phonology. She is currently on the editorial board for Cambridge Elements in Phonology, the Bulletin of Sindh Studies (Netherlands: Brill), and the Sindh Journal of Linguistics (Karachi).
Dr. Cole’s research investigates prosody and speech dynamics in human languages, towards the goal of understanding the ways in which languages and dialects differ in their sound “profile” and the cognitive systems that support real-time speech production and comprehension. Her work explores how prosodic sound patterns function simultaneously to encode the structure of sentences and larger discourse, meaning related to the communicative situation, speaker’s emotion, and the dynamics of social interaction. She uses computational and statistical methods to model prosody in experimental and observational data, with an emphasis on methods that enable automated analysis of large, multi-talker/hearer datasets in all human languages. Dr. Cole has pioneered the use of crowd-sourced perceptual ratings of prosody as the basis for building models of prosody in diverse languages from around the world. Dr. Cole’s current research includes collaborative work on prosody in individuals with autism and speech disorders related to neurological impairment, and a speech research infrastructure project to develop an open, scalable, data-driven framework to enable of language science researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to collaboratively develop holistic datasets that simultaneously represent language at many levels of of description.
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Jennifer Cole
Unlocking Prosody: Discovering Structured Variation and Rich Context Effects
There is an increasing awareness of the role of prosody in speech perception and comprehension, yet at the same time, there is increasing evidence of pervasive, substantial variation in the phonological and phonetic expression of prosody. Thus, despite progress in identifying acoustic correlates of prosody, and similar progress in identifying the dimensions of structural and pragmatic information encoded in prosody, researchers are still working to build a theory of the mapping between prosodic form and its linguistic functions that explains when, where and why variability arises, and how listeners cope with variable input in comprehending speech. I point to two approaches to prosody research that I believe are key to advancing our understanding of the mapping between prosodic form and its function: (1) analyzing the structure of prosodic variation within and across individual speaker-hearers, and (2) examining prosody in relation to the linguistic context of the utterance, the social context of the communication, and the psychological context of the speaker-hearer. These approaches are illustrated by research from my lab on the production and perception of prosody, with a focus on intonation—the melodic aspect of prosody.