Research

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

• L’adquisició de l’entonació en català, castella i anglès (Adquisition of intonation in Catalan, Spanish, and English)

Collaborative project Cambridge-Oxford-Universitat Autonònoma de Barcelona, with Pilar Prieto (Principal Investigator), Elinor Payne, Brechjte Post and Maria del Mar Vanrell. We will analyse three longitudinal audiovisual corpus available in CHILDES (Serra-Solé corpus for Catalan, Llinàs-Ojea for Peninsular Spanish, Providence for American English, and Forrester for British English) analysing and quantifying the development of early intonation patterns, especially the fine phonetic detail of alignment and scaling.

October 2009-July 2010. Funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Beques Batista i Roca, 2009 PBR 00018).

• A cross-linguistic study of intonational development in young infants and children.
Collaborative project Cambridge-Oxford-Universitat Autonònoma de Barcelona, with Pilar Prieto, Elinor Payne, Brechjte Post (Principal Investigator) and Maria del Mar Vanrell. The main goal is studying the child acquisition of intonation cross-linguistically, and how this relates to patterns of linguistic maturation. We analyse a corpus of child-mother dyadic interactions (APriL - Acquisition of PRosody in Languages) which was collected in an earlier project. APril will be made available very soon.

February 2009-January 2010. Funded by a British Academy Small Research Grant.

• Glissando: Annotated corpus for prosodic studies in Catalan and Spanish (‘Glissando: corpus de habla anotado para estudios prosódicos en catalán y español’).
Coordinated by Juan María Garrido Almiñana and integrated by 16 researchers in 3 groups (UPF, UAB, UVA). December 2008-December 2011. Funded by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia).

• Adquisició del ritme en català, castella i anglès (Rhythm acquisition in Catalan, Spanish, and English).
With Pilar Prieto (Principal investigator), Elinor Payne, Brechjte Post and Maria del Mar Vanrell. The main goal was to investigate the acquisition of prosody cross-linguistically. We collected a corpus of recordings of children aged 3, 4, and 6 and their mothers in Catalan, Spanish, and English. We analysed: (a) the acquisition of rhythm ; (b) the rhythm of Child Directed Speech; (d) acquisition of stress and truncacion phenomena; (c) adult rhythm as measured by different metrics.

September 2007-September 2008, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Beques Batista i Roca, 2007 PBR 29).

PAST RESEARCH PROJECTS

• Estructura prosódica y adquisición de la prosodia en catalán y español (Prosodic structure and acquisition of prosodic structure in Catalan and Spanish).
The project was coordinated by Pilar Prieto and had two broad aims. One aim was to gain an insight into the perceptual cues to prosodic structure by examining: (a) the role of tonal alignment as a perceptual cue to syllabic structure; (b) as a perceptual cue to word edges; and (c) duration and pitch accent as perceptual cues to the detection of lexical stress. Another goal of the project was to study the acquisition of prosody by infants whose first language is Catalan and/or Spanish. December 2006-December 2009. Ref. HUM2006-01758/FILO, awarded by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia.

• AMPER-Madrid: Atlas Multimedia de la Prosodia del Espacio Románico (Multimedia Atlas of the Prosody of the Romance Space).
With Mª Dolores Ramírez Verdugo.
December 2003-December 2006. Funded by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia and Unión Europea (Ref DGICYT-BFF2003-08487). Michel Contini and Martínez Celdrán were the Principal Investigators.

MAIN RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Intonational phonology. A current issue of interest is the role of the phrase accent (-T) in Spanish phonology. Do we have any phonetic evidence? It is needed in the phonology? I’m working on that with Mercedes Cabrera Abreu, Eva Estebas Vilaplana and Francisco Vizcaíno Ortega (see Publications).

• The intonation of Spanish dialects.
I’m currently involved on an international working party aiming at developing a transcription system for Spanish capable of dealing with the different Peninsular and Latin American dialects. For instance, we have to decide on the number and type of intonational labels, the typical form of the main sentence types, such as, for instance, questions versus statements, etc. The last meeting was held at the Sp-ToBI Workshop (PaPI, 17-19 June 2009, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria).

• The acquisition of prosody in the first and second language. I’m working on the acquisition of Spanish intonation by second language learners together with María Dolores Ramírez Verdugo (see Publications). I’m also working on the acquisition of rhythm and of intonation by the child, together with Elinor Payne, Brechtje Post, Pilar Prieto and Maria del Mar Vanrell (see Research Projects below).

• Syntax-phonology interface. A good example is the intonation of extra-sentential elements (also called parentheses, parenthetical elements, sentence-external elements, tags, and enclitized elements). These are non-canonical syntactic constructions such as sentential adverbs (‘Obviously, she is wrong’) and dislocated phrases (‘They are nice, those girls’). Syntactically, these elements are considered to be governed by the root node, and in this sense they are ‘external’ to the phrase. Prosodically, they are also ‘external’ to the phrase since they obligatorily form independent phrasal units, which are demarcated by prosodic boundaries from the rest of the phrase. For this reason they have been an object of interest for both syntactic and prosodic studies, where they have been used to define the intonational phrase as a domain of the prosodic hierarchy (see, for instance, bibliography in Astruc & Nolan 2007, in Publications).

My doctoral dissertation (Cambridge University 2005, The intonation of extra-sentential elements in Catalan and English - email me for a copy) investigated the intonation of extra-sentential elements using data from Catalan and English, languages which encode information structure in different ways. The results of the four production experiments reported in my thesis show that extra-sentential elements do not behave as consistently as described in the literature. While certain types of elements such as, for instance, sentential adverbs, nearly always form independent phrases, other elements show a trade-off between intonation and prosodic separation. My interpretation is that both prosodic breaks and intonational mechanisms such as deaccentuation, reductions in pitch range, and/or tonal copy can be used in combination to signal the special status of the extra-sentential element.