Sarah Bibyk
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Graduate Student, Brain & Cognitive Sciences |
Contact Information
- Meliora 428
- Brain & Cognitive Sciences
- University of Rochester
- Rochester, NY 14627-0268
- (585) 275-2508
Education
2010 MA, Linguistics, the Ohio State University
2010 BA, Linguistics, the Ohio State University
Research Overview
No person talks in a monotone; we all use modulations in our pitch when we speak. In some cases our different uses of pitch are obvious, such as when we alter an ordinary statement "It's raining right now" to become a question "It's raining right now?" by raising our pitch at the end of the sentence. However in general it has proven continually difficult for linguists to define the mapping between pitch contours and particular discourse functions, despite the fact that we all have reasonably clear intuitions about how to interpret these various contours when we converse. My current research focuses on how speakers may use different boundary tones to convey different intentions during conversation. My long-term research goals include investigating how boundary tones may interact with different kinds of pitch accents and also how children learn to correctly use and interpret the intonational system of their native language.
Selected Publications
- Ito, K., Bibyk, S., Wagner, L., & Speer, S. R. (under review). Gradual acquisition of contrast-marking prosody for referential resolution in English.
Conference Presentations
- Bibyk, S., Heeren, W., Gunlogson, C., & Tanenhaus, M. (2011, September). Gotta conundrum, gotta solution. Poster session presented at the conference on Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody, Montréal, QC.