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Readings
for the LOT Winter School 2025 course titled
The Phonetics and Phonology of Prosody

Preparatory Readings
These are papers to read as preparation before the course starts

  1. Arvaniti, Amalia. To appear. The representation of intonation (revised 2024). In Kuniya Nasukawa, Bridget Samuels, Geoffrey Schwartz, Miklós Törkenczy (eds),The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Phonology.

  2. Arvaniti, Amalia. 2020. The phonetics of prosody. Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.411

Mandatory Readings
These are papers to read during the course; be prepared to discuss them in class

Monday

Arvaniti, Amalia, Argyro Katsika & Na Hu. 2024. Variability, overlap, and cue trading in intonation. Language 100 (2): 265-307.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.2024.a929737

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Questions (to be discussed on Wednesday)

  1. What are the weaknesses of AM? Are they about theory or practice?

  2. Is FPCA a good choice for this dataset and if so, why? If not, why not?

  3. To what extent do the findings of AKH differ from traditional AM (and other) views about intonation phonetics? To what extent do they support AM?

  4. What can be gained by combining F0 and duration in FPCA? In your view, can we do the same with other measures, and if so, which ones? If not, why not?

  5. How can we partition variability and does this matter?

Tuesday

No new reading; continuing with discussion of material covered in Arvaniti et al. (2024).

Wednesday

Arvaniti, Amalia. 2021. Measuring speech rhythm. In Rachael-Anne Knight and Jane Setter (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Phonetics, pp. 312-335. https://www.cambridge.org/nl/universitypress/subjects/languages-linguistics/phonetics-and-phonology/cambridge-handbook-phonetics?format=HB&isbn=9781108495738

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Questions (to be discussed on Thursday)

  1. Why has speech rhythm been linked to isochrony?

  2. What is, in your view, the most convincing evidence for rhythm classes? What is the least convincing evidence?

  3. Do you think there are problematic practices in the use of rhythm metrics and if so, which ones? What are the advantages of using metrics?

  4. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using other research methods for rhythm like those discussed in Arvaniti (2021).

Thursday

Orrico, Riccardo, Stella Gryllia, Na Hu, Jiseung Kim & Amalia Arvaniti. 2024. Prosodic prominence in Greek: methodological and theoretical considerations. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024.

https://www.isca-archive.org/speechprosody_2024/orrico24_speechprosody.html

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Questions (to be discussed on Friday)

  1. Can you think of prima facie advantages and disadvantages of asking RPT participants to chose the most prominent vs. all prominent words?

  2. What were the differences in the results of the two tasks? Do you agree with how they were interpreted by the authors?

  3. What are the main conclusions of the paper? Are they about RPT, the notion of prominence, or both? Do you agree with these conclusions and if not, why not? Why might you have done differently?

Friday

Hu, Na & Amalia Arvaniti. 2024. Individual variability in the use of tonal and non-tonal cues in intonation. JASA Express Letters 4, 095203 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0028613

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Questions 

  1. How do the pooled results of Hu & Arvaniti (2024) differ from those of individual speakers?

  2. What conclusions can we draw from these differences for our understanding of phonetic phenomena, on the one hand, and of the treatment and investigation of individual variability, on the other?

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GENERAL DISCUSSION

  1. What did you learn about prosody that you did not know before?

  2. What did you find most and least convincing in relation to what you already knew (or expected?

  3. Are you convinced of the need for phonological representation of prosody? If so, why? If not, why not?

  4. In what ways do the readings connect with one another (if at all)?

  5. In your view, is there a need for more research on prosody, and if so, what areas do you think attention should be given to? (e.g. more languages, different phenomena, interface with syntax, etc.)

Further Readings (optional)
The list below contains recommendations for further reading, if you are interested in a specific topic covered in this course; you do not have to do this reading for the course

Surveys and edited volumes on prosody

  1. Barnes, Jonathan & Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel. 2022. Prosodic Theory and Practice. The MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262543170/prosodic-theory-and-practice/                          This volume provides comprehensive overviews of and debates on major prosodic theories and practices.

  2. Gussenhoven, Carlos & Aoju Chen (eds). 2020. The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198832232.001.0001    This volume provides overviews of research on many aspects of prosody, including phonetics, phonology, measurement, acquisition, and processing, as well as comprehensive surveys of prosodic systems.

Intonation

  1. Arvaniti, A. 2016. Analytical decisions in intonation research and the role of representations: Lessons from Romani. Laboratory Phonology 7(1): 6, pp. 1–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/labphon.14

  2. ​Arvaniti, A., S. Gryllia, M. Baltazani, (to appear). The complex relationship between the tunes and pragmatics of Greek wh-questions. To appear in Eckardt, Regine, George Walkden & Nicole Dehé (eds), The Handbook of Noncanonical Questions. Oxford University Press.                                        Download from: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/008022

  3. Clark, Brady. 2017. Pragmatics and intonation. Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.208

  4. Grice, Martine, Simon Wehrle, Martina Krüger, Malin Spaniol, Francesco Cangemi, Kai Vogeley. 2023. Linguistic prosody in autism spectrum disorder—An overview. Language and Linguistics Compass 2023; e12498.                                                                                          https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12498

  5. Holliday, Nicole. 2021. Prosody and Sociolinguistic Variation in American Englishes. Annual Review of Linguistics 7: 55 – 68.                                                                               https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031220-093728

Speech rhythm

  1. Assaneo, M. Florencia & David Poeppel. 2018. The coupling between auditory and motor cortices is rate-restricted: Evidence for an intrinsic speech-motor rhythm. Science advances, 4(2), eaao3842.                                                                                                                                                                DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aao3842

  2. Arvaniti, Amalia. 2009. Rhythm, timing and the timing of rhythm. Phonetica 66: 46–63. https://doi.org/10.1159/000208930

  3. Arvaniti, Amalia. 2012. The usefulness of metrics in the quantification of speech rhythm. Journal of Phonetics 40(3): 351-373.                                                                 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2012.02.003

  4. He, Deling, Eugene H. Buder & Gavin M. Bidelman. 2024. Cross-linguistic and acoustic-driven effects on multiscale neural synchrony to stress rhythms. Brain and Language 256, 105463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2024.105463

  5. Tilsen, Sam & Amalia Arvaniti. 2013. Speech rhythm analysis with decomposition of the amplitude envelope: characterizing rhythmic patterns within and across languages. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 134(1): 628-39.                                      https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4807565

Prominence

  1. Ladd, D. Robert & Amalia Arvaniti. 2023. Prosodic prominence across Languages. Annual Review of Linguistics 9(1): 171-193.                                                                                http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031120-101954

  2. Cole Jennifer, Yoonsook Mo, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson. 2010. Signal-based and expectation-based factors in the perception of prosodic prominence. Laboratory Phonology 1: 425–452 https://doi.org/10.1515/labphon.2010.022

  3. Orrico, Riccardo, Stella Gryllia, Jiseung Kim, Amalia Arvaniti. 2025. Individual variability and the H* ~ L+H* contrast in English. Language and Cognition 17 ,  e9 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2024.62

Phrasing

  1. Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie. 2020. The role of phrase-level prosody in speech production planning. In Carlos Gussenhoven & Aoju Chen (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody, pp. 522-538. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198832232.001.0001

  2. Swets, Benjamin, Susanne Fuchs, Jelena Krivokapić & Caterina Petrone. 2021. A cross-linguistic study of individual differences in speech planning. Frontiers in Psychology 12.                    https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.655516

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