Course Description
This course will give an overview of prosodic annotation, focusing primarily on using the ToBI system (for Tones and Break Indices) for Mainstream American English. The course will be very hands-on from day one, and students will be given labelling assignments using the free software Praat. By the end of the course, students should understand the basics of ToBI labelling and the inventory of ToBI categories. They will learn how to recognize and interpret the acoustic cues to prosodic structure (i.e. prominences and boundaries), and be able to assign possible category membership to prosodic events in spoken language utterances. While we will focus mainly on ToBI, we will briefly address basics of several additional prosodic annotation systems (eg. RPT, PoLaR, RaP), and discuss their relative strengths, uses and compatibility. Instruction will be based largely on labelling the prosody of Mainstream American English, but many of the concepts and methods can be applied to prosodic annotation of other dialects of English and other languages
Area Tags: Prosody, Speech, Phonetics, Phonology, Perception
(Sessions 1 & 2) Tuesday/Friday 10:30am – 11:50am
Location: ILC S416
Instructor: Alejna Brugos
Alejna Brugos is a researcher in the phonetics and phonology of prosodic structure. She has more than 20 years of experience in prosodic and acoustic phonetic annotation, and has been teaching prosodic labelling since 2006. She works with several prosodic annotations systems and their extensions, including ToBI and PoLaR, for which she has collaborated with others to develop training materials. Her work with prosodic annotation is informed and complemented by research into the production and perception of prosodic categories, including the complex interaction of acoustic cues. She is currently a researcher at Simmons University in Boston.
