Meetings

Next meetings

Our next meeting will be:

1st July, 3pm CEST: Patrick L. Rohrer (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) on From Speech to Gesture: Theoretical Tensions in the Notion of Prominence

If you would like to host a meeting in Autumn/Winter 2026, please contact Mariia or Rebecca (email addresses below).

Past meetings

May 2026

Our most recent meeting was on Wednesday 13th May.

Host: Serpil Karabüklü (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago) on How to Capture Differences in Nonmanuals: Behavioral and Computational Analyses
Guest Discussant: Nick Palfreyman (University of Lancashire)

Thanks to Adam Schembri and his ERC-funded SignMorph project for their financial and practical support.

Slides, video, transcript and recommended reading will follow soon.

April 2026

Our April meeting was on Wednesday 22nd April 2026.

Host: Amanda Brown (Syracuse) and Masaaki Kamiya (Hamilton) on Investigating Ambiguity in English at the Sentence Level in Prosody and Gesture.

Enjoy here the slides and  video of the presentation (transcript coming soon!).

Recommended reading: Brown, A. & Kamiya, M. (2019). Gesture in contexts of scopal ambiguity: Negation and quantification in English. Applied Psycholinguistics, 40: 1141- 71.  doi: 10.1017/S014271641900016X

March 2026

Our March meeting was on Wednesday 25th March 2026.

Host: Suzanne Aussems (Warwick) on Beyond stimulus looks: How to analyse infant social looks and communicative gestures during looking-time experiments

Enjoy here the slides, video and transcript of the presentation.

Suggested resource: Suzanne Aussems and Sotaro Kita. Coding Manual and ELAN Template supporting: Do 13-16-Month-Old Infants’ Communicative Behaviors Reveal Emerging Referential Understanding of Sound-Symbolic Words? DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/JY465 

December 2025

Our December meeting was on Wednesday 10th December 2025. 

Host: Maria Francesca Ferin (Siena) on Analysing intonation: comparing perceptual annotations and acoustic measurements.

Enjoy here the slides of the presentation. 

Recommended reading:  Jun, Sun-Ah. 2022. The ToBI Transcription System: Conventions, Strengths, and Challenges. In Jonathan Barnes & Stefanie Shattuck- Hufnagel (eds.), Prosodic Theory and Practice, 151–181. The MIT Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10413.003.0007.

November 2025

Our November meeting was on Wednesday 19th November 2025. 

Host: Svenja Krieger (University of Konstanz) on Guidelines for the annotation of intonation data in multi- and bilingual populations 

Enjoy here the Zoom recording, transcription and slides of the presentation. 

October 2025

Our first meeting was on Wednesday 22nd October 2025. 

Hosts: Mariia Pronina (University of the Balearic Islands) & Rebecca Woods (Newcastle University) on our plans for Making Waves and on our work on Ecological validity of elicited prosodic productions in children
Enjoy here the Zoom recording (the first couple of minutes were not recorded, it starts from the second slide!) and slides of the presentations and the transcript for the presentation on ecological validity of elicited prosodic productions in children.

Recommended reading:  Vanrell, M. del M., Feldhausen, I., & Astruc, L. (2018). The discourse completion task in Romance prosody research: Status quo and outlook. In I. Feldhausen, J. Fliessbach, & M. del M. Vanrell (Eds.),  Methods in prosody: A Romance language perspective*(pp. 191–227). Language Science Press.

General information about meetings

Meetings take place monthly on themes including:

• Methods - e.g. eliciting gesture from children

• Annotation - e.g. applying existing annotation schemes to child data

• Theory 

Meetings will be 55 minutes long. They will feature a short intro and/or presentation from the meeting leader, but are intended to be discursive and interactive for the majority of the meeting time. We believe there's a lot of experience to be shared and inspiration to be gained so let's talk!

We may, with permission, record presentations and post them here. Discussion sessions and any presentation of potentially sensitive data will not be recorded.

If there are any themes you'd like to explore (and maybe lead a session on) please contact Rebecca (rebecca.woods@newcastle.ac.uk) or Mariia (mariia.pronina@uib.cat).