Sasha Calhoun

Sasha’s research focuses on the functions of prosody and intonation, i.e., the rhythm, timing and tune of speech. Prosody is integral to spoken language, and is essential to our ability to speak, understand and learn language. Sasha has been involved in a range of international and national collaborations looking at the functions of prosody in languages including Samoan, te reo Māori, Chinese, Spanish and German, as well as English. This research, and that which she has supervised, has looked at the role of prosody in signalling important information in speech, in speech production and perception, in signalling pragmatic meanings, in second language acquisition and in distinguishing varieties of English. She has recently worked on a Marsden funded project, 'Searching for focus in a shared world: the integration of prosody and syntax in cross-linguistic speech perception', looking at the perception of focus in English and Samoan.

Sasha has also been involved in work looking at intonation in an exemplar-theoretic framework. She is interested in prosody and intonation from a wide variety of perspectives, including phonetic and phonological analysis, the role of prosody in psycholinguistic models of language production and comprehension, as well as computational modelling and corpus investigation. She has also worked on generating prosody in speech synthesis.

Sasha welcomes enquiries for PhD supervision on topics related to the research interests above.