Bettina Braun's Research Interests

General Outline

One of my main research interests is to uncover the structure behind intonational contours. This includes the production of pitch accents in different contexts, and in different languages. Currently, we are running a behavioural experiment, in which participants have to mimic artificially produced intonation contours. We hope to find an answer to the question whether English consists of a fixed small set of intonation contours or whether intonation is not much constraint.

A further interest is the perception of pitch accents, i.e. the relation between intonational form and meaning. In my thesis I investigated the intonational marking and the perception of contrast in German. Recently, I have been collaborating with Dr Andrea Weber to investigate the influence of prosodic marking on reference resolution, using eye-tracking data.

Current Research

• MRI Imaging of laryngal movements in whispered and voiced speech (recent results)
• Intonational Phonology
• Prosody--Semantics Interface