Several members of the U-M linguistics community presented at the 13th annual Speech Prosody conference, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from May 26–29 2026.
Out of 174 eligible submissions, current graduate student Kendall Lowe was awarded one of two Best Student Paper Awards for her paper titled ““You Good?”: Examining the Coordination of F0 and Eyebrow Movements in the Differentiation of Sentence Types.” This paper was co-authored by former U-M postdoc Yoonjeong Lee, and two U-M faculty members, Natasha Abner and Jelena Krivokapić. As detailed in their abstract, this project analyzed “speakers’ productions of the polysemous AAE phrase ‘you good’ and semantically related monosemous expressions… to investigate F0 peak placement, eyebrow movement frequency, eyebrow raise distribution, and the temporal alignment of pitch and gesture peaks.”
The full list of U-M presentations is given below:
- ““You Good?”: Examining the Coordination of F0 and Eyebrow Movements in the Differentiation of Sentence Types.”
Authors: Kendall Lowe (U-M graduate student); Yoonjeong Lee (former U-M postdoc); Natasha Abner (U-M faculty); Jelena Krivokapić (U-M faculty) - “Phrase-final whisper in Spanish broadcast speech”
Authors: Nicholas Henriksen (U-M faculty); Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya (U-M faculty; Claire Byrd (U-M undergraduate student); Nikhil Walling (U-M undergraduate student) - “On the limited salience of variation in prenuclear F0”
Authors: Jennifer Cole (U-M alum); Jeremy Steffman. - “Phonological Encodings of Speaker Surprise in American English Rising and Falling Nuclear Tunes”
Authors: Jennifer Cole (U-M alum); Rebekah Stanhope - “Examining the role of prosody and information structure in Hungarian speech and co-speech gestural coordination: An EMA study”
Authors: Csilla Tatar (U-M graduate student); Ezra Keshet (U-M faculty); Jelena Krivokapić (U-M faculty)
