Course Description

Prosody is an umbrella term that refers to intonation, rhythm, and phrasing, phenomena that apply at the utterance level. Prosody is an essential part of early language acquisition and critical for speech planning, processing, and communication. Despite its importance, the study of prosody remains relatively limited and often restricted to measuring its phonetic exponents without due attention to the structure that underlies their use, a practice that can hamper our understanding (e.g. by unwittingly introducing confounds in experimental design). In this course we will cover the essential components of prosody from both formal and experimental perspectives, considering typologically different languages. Each class will address a differ aspect of prosody and include a lecture, reading discussion, and a practical hands-on component. The course should be useful both to those who wish to pursue further research on prosody and those who want to know more about prosody so that they can control it as a factor is socio- and psycholinguistic research.