Organisation profile: Functions of Audiovisual Prosody

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The FOAP project is concerned with a functional approach to both verbal and 
visual prosody (called audiovisual prosody) in spoken conversations. It is 
intuitively clear that prosody plays an important role in daily life spoken 
interactions. In general, it provides utterances with ‘extra’ 
information that is often not explicitly contained in the lexical and syntactic 
make-up of a sentence. Indeed, various studies of verbal prosody have shown 
that it can be used to mark information structure and turn-taking or add 
expressive power to the propositional content of an utterance. But while we 
have learned a lot about the pragmatics of verbal prosody, we still miss a good 
deal of real knowledge into how auditive cues combine with visual ones.