Stefan Benus' research

Optimality Theory and Phonetics-Phonology Interface [Lincom Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 40] Muenchen: Lincom, 2009, 151pp [ISBN: 978-38-9586-395-0] Peer-review on the Linguist List is here

Výučba výslovnosti cudzích jazykov pomocou porovnávacej akustickej analyzy Beňuš, Š., Bírová, J., Chebenová V., Molnárová, A. Nitra: UKF, 2010 [ISBN: 978-80-8094-741-5] Kontaktujte ma v prípade záujmu o knihu sbenus@ukf.sk

Prosody

• Prosody and discourse, pragmatics and emotions
  Julia Hirschberg, Agustín Gravano, and I are investigating discourse and pragmatic functions of cue words in task oriented collaborative dialogues and turn-taking strategies.
• Adaptation in turn-initiations (accepted). In: A. Esposito (Ed.). Toward Autonomous, Adaptive, and Context-Aware Multimodal Interfaces: Theoretical and Practical Issues; Lecture Notes in Computer Science [LNAI]. Springer-Verlag.
• Are we 'in sync': Turn-taking in collaborative dialogues Proceedings of 10th INTERSPEECH, pp. 2167-2170, Brighton, 2009.
• Variability and stability in collaborative dialogues: turn-taking and filled pauses Proceedings of 10th INTERSPEECH, pp. 709-799, Brighton, 2009.
• On the role of context in the interpretation of 'okay' Proceedings of 45th Conference of Association of Computer Linguistics, Prague, 2007.
• Prosody, emotions, and... 'whatever' Proceedings of 10th Eurospeech-Interspeech Conference, Antwerp, 2007.
• Prosody of backchannels in American English Proceedings of 16th International Coneference of Phonetic Sciences, Saarbrucken, 2007.
• Classification of Discourse Functions of Affirmative Words in Spoken Dialogue Proceedings of 10th Eurospeech-Interspeech Conference, Antwerp, 2007.

• Prosody of Slovak
  Together with colleagues in the Speech Analysis and Processing group of the Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences we investigate the prosodic structure of Slovak and ways of modeling this structure.
• Effects of lexical stress and speech rate on the quantity and quality of Slovak vowels Proceedings of 5th Speech Prosody Conference, Chicago, 2010 [with Katalin Mády].
• Prosodic characteristics and emotional meaning of Slovak hot-spot words.In: A. Esposito, R. Vich (Eds.). Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions; Lecture Notes in Computer Science [LNAI 5641], pp. 18-27. Springer-Verlag.
• Vocal gestures in Slovak: Emotions and prosody In: Multimodal Signals: Cognitive and Algorithmic Issues. Lecture Notes in Computer Science [LNAI 5398], pp. 223-231. Springer-Verlag.

• Prosody of deceptive speech
  Julia Hirschberg, Frank Enos and I, together with colleagues at SRI and University of Colorado, are investigating prosodic cues that correlate with deceptive speech.
• Pauses in Deceptive Speech Proceedings of3rd Speech Prosody Conference, Dresden, 2006.
• Distinguishing Deceptive from Non-Deceptive Speech Proceedings of 9th Eurospeech-Interspeech Conference, Lisbon, 2005.
• Personality factors in human deception detection: Comparing human to machine performance Proceedings of 10th Interspeech Conference, Pittsburgh, 2006.

Phonetics-Phonology Interface

• On the phonetic status of syllabic consonants: Evidence from Slovak (under review)
  with Marianne Pouplier. Laboratory Phonology.
• The acoustics of mid vowels [e] and [o] in Slovak
  with Milan Rusko. Proceedings of the 155th conference of the Acoustical Society of America, pp. 2363-2368, 2008.
• Dynamics of phonological cognition
  With Adamantios Gafos. Cognitive Science, 30 (5), 905-943, 2006.
• Articulatory characteristics of Hungarian 'transparent' vowels
  With Adamantios Gafos. Journal of Phonetics, 35, 271-300, 2007.
• Qualitative and Quantitative Aspects of Vowel Harmony: A Dynamics Model
  With Adamantios Gafos. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Phonetics and phonology of transparent vowel in Hungarian
  With Adamantios Gafos and Louis Goldstein. Proceedings of 29th meeting of Berkeley Linguistic Society.
• On neutral vowels in Hungarian
  With Adamantios Gafos. Proceedings of 15th International Coneference of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona, 2003.
• Gestural coordination and the distribution of English "geminates"
  With Iris Smorodinsky and Adamantios Gafos. Proceedings of Penn Linguistic Colloqium 27 (PWPL, Volume 10.1).

Phonology

• Consonant clusters in Singapore English.
  With Arto Anttila, Vivien Fong, and Jenifer Nycz. Phonology 25(2), 1-36, 2008.
• Deriving Consonant Cluster Phonotactics: Evidence from Singapore English
  With Arto Anttila, Vivien Fong, and Jenifer Nycz. Proceedings of NELS 32.

Other projects

Relationship between humanities and natural sciences

• Building interfaces between the humanities and cognitive sciences: The case of human speech, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 9, 353-374.,

With Gregory Ward, Elisa Sneed, Agustin Gravano and Julia Hirschberg we are investigating the interplay of prosody and semantics in the contrast between 'That would be ...' and 'That is ...' constructions.

• The effect of prosody and semantic modality on the assessment of speaker certainty Proceedings of 4th Speech Prosody Conference, Campinas, Brazil, 2008.

Focus Domain Neutralization and Sentence Stress, abstract (pdf)