Plinio Almeida Barbosa

Plínio A. Barbosa
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of the Departament of Linguistics
Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem/Unicamp
CP 6045, 13084-971 Campinas-SP, Brazil
Phone: +55 19 35211511 e FAX: +55 19 32891501
E-mail: pabarbosa.unicampbr@gmail.com

Responsible for: Speech Prosody Studies Group
President of: Luso-Brazilian Speech Science Association

Research
Publications

Agenda:

As a member of a Scientific/Review Committee in a congress

Ongoing conferences:
. Speech Prosody 2010
. Workshop on "Prosodic prominence: perceptual and automatic identification"
. Propor 2010
. Interspeech 2010
Past conferences:
I Iberian SL Tech 2009
Int. Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) 2003, 2007
Interspeech 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
Speech Prosody Conf. 2004, 2006, 2008
Propor 2008 (Aveiro, Portugal)

As a member of a congress organising committee

Interspeech 2005
Speech Prosody Conf. 2008, Campinas, Brazil (May 6-9)*

*Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2008 (ISBN = 978-0-61622-003-0)

As a guest editor
Speech Communication Special Issue on Iberian Languages - 50(11/12), 2008)

As a former editor (replaced by M. L. C. Lima on Jan. 18th, 2008)

In-Cognito - Cadernos Românicos em Ciências Cognitivas

Teaching
Education

Last collaborations

PoSTPort project at INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal (March 2009)

Heron project at IEETA-Univ. de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal (March-April 2007)

Present projects

Cross-linguistic analysis and functional-dynamical modelling of intonation (with Hansjörg Mixdorff, and Sandra Madureira)

As an ad hoc referree

Journal of Phonetics, Speech communication, IEEE Trans. ASLP

As a member of an Editorial Board

International Journal of Speech Technology
Distúrbios da Comunicação
D.E.L.T.A.
Intercâmbio
Revista de Estudos da Linguagem/UFMG
ReVeL

As a former member of a Scientific Association Board

ISCA Representative of Special Interest Group on Iberian Languages (2006-2008)

As a member of a Scientific Association Board

ISCA Adivisory Council (from Jan. 2009 for four years)

As a member of a Scientific Association

ISCA, IPA, SproSIG, SIG-IL, LBASS

Research interests and research relations

Speech science is the main scientific interest of our group, the Speech Prosody Studies Group. Under this broad research term, we work mostly with the analysis and modelling of speech prosody (rhythm and intonation), especially the analysis and modelling of duration under a dynamical perspective (coupled oscillators). By studying and automatically generating the utterances' rhythmic structure, our group tries to understand how the stress patterns are formed and structured, and how they vary in different dialects and subjects. Durational contours are considered as gestalten whose building blocks are V-to-V units (unit from a vowel onset to the next one. Cf the p-center litterature). These studies aim at illuminating (1) how rhythm organises speech production, (2) how rhythm guides speech perception, (3) how rhythm is specified in dynamical, abstract terms, (4) how rhythm guides the phonetic implementation, and (5) how a model of coupled oscillators can pace the act of uttering. The relationship with the linguistic rhythm is worked on by analysing and modelling the stress patterns underlying phonological processes such as stress clash, secondary stress, and rhythmic restructuring under speech rate increase.

Current projects (heading or participating in): Dynamical analysis and modelling of the prosody of spontaneous, expressive speech (CNPq), Improving the speech rhythm production model (CNPq), Speech pathology investigation.