Since January 1st, Marzena Żygis is working in her DFG project Audio-visual prosody of whispered and semi-whispered speech (PROSPER) on the study of whispered and semi-whispered speech, which has hardly been investigated so far. The challenging nature of her goal lies in the fact that fundamental frequency, one of the main correlates of prosodic variation, is entirely absent in whispered speech. Thus, she proposes an analysis of prosody through other acoustic parameters such as intensity, duration, and spectral properties of vowels and consonants. The acoustic parameter spectrum should also be extended to include the gestural dimension. The motion capture technology of the ZAS laboratory will be used for this purpose.
Further information on the project can be found here.