Angeliki Athanasopoulou

Course number	Course title	Semester
LING 699.50/599.50	Methods in Psycholinguistics	Fall 2023
LING 600/697	Professional Development	Fall 2023
LING 416	Language Acquisition II	Winter 2024
LING 403	Phonology II	Winter 2024

Projects

When a blue berry becomes a blueberry

In this SSHRC-funded study, Dr. Curtin and I investigate an aspect of prosodic development, or the melodic properties of language, that exists in structures bigger than single words. We study children’s abilities to comprehend and produce phrases like “blue berry” and compounds like “blueberry” between the ages of 4 and 8 years. These structures often show late development (early teen years), in contrast to the rest of the sound system of a language (e.g., consonants and vowels) and despite the sensitivity young infants show for the physical properties of prosody (timing, pitch, etc.). Six-year-olds show distinct categories for compounds and phrases, but their productions' properties continue developing until the age of 8 years (for compounds). Our project tests the hypothesis that in addition to the physical properties of the melodies, children’s development of different melodic structures depends on their development of the corresponding abstract, mental categories. By understanding the changes of the prosodic system in development, we gain insights about the prosodic system itself and the linguistic models of prosody.

Awards

Faculty of Arts Emerging Teacher Award, University of Calgary. 2021

Publications

Processing of Compound and Phrasal Prosody in (Canadian) English. Celeste Olson, Suzanne Curtin, and Angeliki Athanasopoulou. Speech Prosody 2024. (2024)
What makes a geminate? An acoustic study of consonants in Garo. Cheman Baira A’gitok and Angeliki Athanasopoulou. 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences. (2023)
Prosodic prominence in a stressless language: An acoustic investigation of Indonesian. Angeliki Athanasopoulou, Irene Vogel, and Nadya Pincus. Journal of Linguistics. 1-41. (2021)
Utterance-initial prosodic differences between statements and questions in infant-directed speech. Susan Geffen, Kelly Burkinshaw, Angeliki Athanasopoulou, and Suzanne Curtin. Journal of Child Language. (2022)
Exploring the front fricative contrast in Greek: A study of acoustic variability based on cepstral coefficients. Jason Lilley, Laura Spinu, and Angeliki Athanasopoulou. Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 393-424. (2021)
Variability in French word-final schwa: The effect of focus. Angeliki Athanasopoulou and Irene Vogel. Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 16: Selected papers from the 47th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. 8-18. (2020)