About

Sun-Ah Jun, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. Her research focuses on intonational phonology, prosodic typology, phonetics, and laboratory phonology, with particular interest in prosody and its interface with syntax, semantics, and sentence processing. She has made significant contributions to the understanding of prosodic systems, especially in Korean and other Asian languages, and has developed models and transcription systems such as K-ToBI for analyzing intonation patterns. Her work also explores language acquisition, re-acquisition, and prosodic transfer, emphasizing how prosody influences sentence processing and language perception. Dr. Jun has authored and edited influential books, including 'Prosodic Typology' (2005) and 'Prosodic Typology II' (2014), and has organized major conferences such as ICPhS2019 Intonation Workshop. Her extensive publication record includes journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings that advance the field of prosody and phonology.

Research topics

• Natural Language Processing
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Speech recognition

Selected publications

• Integrating prosody in anticipatory language processing: how listeners adapt to unconventional prosodic cues

  Language Cognition and Neuroscience · 2021 · 9 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Computer Science

  A growing body of research suggests that language users integrate diverse sources of information in processing and adapt to the variability of language at multiple levels. In two visual-world paradigm studies, we explored whether listeners use prosody to predict a resolution to structures with a PP that is structurally ambiguous between a modifier and an instrument interpretation. The first study revealed that listeners predict a referent that is most compatible with the location of a prosodic boundary, casting anticipatory looks to the appropriate object even before the onset of a disambiguating word. The second study indicated that listeners failed to anticipate instrument resolutions when the prosody of non-experimental filler items was unconventional, even though experimental items remained identical to the first study. The results suggest that listeners adjust their predictive processing to the utility of prosodic information according to whether a speaker reliably conforms to the conventional use of prosody.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Learning to Anticipate Contrast with Prosody: A Visual World Study with L2 Learners

  Speech prosody · 2020 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Becky H. Huang

  The Ohio State University

  2 shared

• Jesse Harris

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Chie Nakamura

  1 shared

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