Nigel Ward, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas, USA

Gina-Anne Levow and I just released on Youtube a 29-lecture, 4-hour, graduate-level tutorial on Speech Prosody. This brief article overviews the lectures most likely to be of interest to language educators. Of course, you can skip this article entirely and go straight to https://nigelward.com/prosody/ to start browsing and viewing.

Overview of the Series

A good place to start is Lectures 2 and 3. These explain why prosody matters, for example, in marking speech as sincere, and in trying to understand what people are really trying to communicate. While prosody may come effortlessly to some people, most of us, and not just language learners, want to become more effective communicators, and prosody skills can play a large role: they help you understand, be understood, and fit in. In the workplace, no one wants to talk to a robot or to hire a person who sounds like one. Students may find these perspectives motivating.

Lecture 28 provides some historical perspective, going back a few decades, to the origins of formal linguistic descriptions of prosody, and back a few centuries, to the first descriptions of intonation, and back a couple of millennia, to make connections to the study of poetry and music. The overall theme is that traditional views are adequate to explain only a fraction of what prosody actually does and how it does it. Yet these views persist, and, being drilled into many students early in their education, can be hard to overcome.

Lecture 27, Teaching Prosody, gives a high-level view of learners' typical goals and needs, including both “native speakers” and language learners. It explains why prosody in the service of pragmatic

functions is especially difficult to learn and to teach, and overviews the general strategies for overcoming these difficulties. Of course, success is often only partial, not least because people vary greatly in their basic prosody-processing abilities, as surveyed in Lecture 26, on individual differences.

Lecture 23 overviews prosody’s three main realms of function --- the phonological, the paralinguistic, and the pragmatic --- and explains the differences in how prosody operates in each realm. While distinguishable in theory, in real life the realms are entangled, and this causes difficult-to-overcome misunderstandings and can complicate learning.

Lectures 21 and 22 discuss how prosody serves pragmatic functions. Details are given on the prosodic expressions of positive feeling, of polite suggestions and of some greetings. These videos also present the notion of "prosodic construction," that is, temporal configurations of multiple prosodic features serving a specific function. These lectures illustrate how constructional meanings are generally gradient, not categorical; how their alignments with words can be flexible; and how some constructions are joint projects, involving both speakers, for example when used to manage turn-taking.

Lectures 10 through 12 cover the phonological linguistic realm, the most familiar one. Lecture 10 explains how languages mark word identity using tone and stress, using examples from Mandarin, Iau, English, Spanish, and Japanese, and shows how pitch height, pitch contour, intensity, duration and voice quality factors combine to realize these distinctions. Lecture 11 illustrates how the prosody of word sequences involves more than just concatenating the prosody of each word in turn, and in particular, how prosody can indicate the semantic relations between adjacent words. Lecture 12 illustrates how prosody can mark prominence and phrasing.

A theme in all realms is the fact that prosody involves more than just intonation, so it is important to consider prosodic features beyond pitch. Lecture 6 discusses volume, rate, timing, and phonetic reduction, and Lecture 7 the main phonation types: modal, creaky, breathy, harmonic, and falsetto. Both lectures cover both articulatory and perceptual aspects. Intonation itself is the topic of three lectures: Lecture 4 on pitch production, Lecture 9 on pitch perception, and Lecture 13 on pitch visualization options.

Finally Video 8 provides a series of exercises aimed at developing perception skills, production skills, and mimicry skills.

For educators, the potential value of this video series is twofold. First, it provides a quick way to catch up on recent findings and perspectives from prosody research. Second, it may suggest ideas for which prosodic skills to teach students and ideas for new ways to help them acquire them.

Conclusion

Overall, it is a long slog from the research forefront in speech science and technology road to classroom-ready teaching materials, of the sort featured on John Levis’s pronunciationforteachers.com site. My hope is that this video tutorial series will shorten the journey for members of the SPLIS community as they strive to improve prosody teaching. I look forward to continuing progress.