Anja Arnhold's website


Welcome

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta (Assistant Professor 2016-2022). For the 2024 winter term, I am also the Director of Graduate Programs for the department.

Previously, I was a postdoc at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, where I worked in the XPRAG.de project BiasQ: Bias in Polar Questions (PIs Maribel Romero and Bettina Braun).

I received my PhD from Goethe-University Frankfurt in 2013 and my MA from the University of Potsdam in 2007, both supervised by Caroline Féry.

Research

I am an experimental phonologist working on prosody. My research looks at the role of intonation and phrasing in expressing pragmatic distinctions in discourse. A core area of my work is the prosodic marking of information structure and its interaction with other areas of grammar.

My recently completed project "Speech prosody of new vs. shared information in Canadian English", funded by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), combines production studies, perception experiments and corpus annotation (with Jiseung Kim).

I am also very interested in prosodic typology and have investigated Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), Finnish, Yakut (with Lena Vasilyeva and Juhani Järvikivi), Mandarin and Inuktitut (in an ongoing collaboration with Richard Compton and Emily Elfner).

My new SSHRC Insight Grant project "Linguistic complexity in the marking of new information" will investigate interactions and trade-offs between prosody and morpho-syntax in marking information structure in English, Mandarin and Kalaallisut (in collaboration with Naja Blytmann Trondhjem).

You can find my published papers here.

New publications

Bao, Wenfu, Anja Arnhold & Juhani Järvikivi (2024). Phonology, homophony, and eyes-closed rest in Mandarin novel word learning: An eye-tracking study in adult native and non-native speakers. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1–30. doi: 10.1017/S0142716424000031 [published paper (open access)]

Alden, McKinley & Anja Arnhold (2023). Acoustics of stress and weight in Central Alaskan Yup’ik. Laboratory Phonology 14(1), 1–44. doi: 10.16995/labphon.8475 [published paper (open access)]

Alden, McKinley & Anja Arnhold (2023). Acoustic correlates of metrical feet in two Yupik languages. In Skarnitzl, Radek & Volín, Jan (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3331–3335). [published paper (open access)]

Science communication

I gave a general-public targeted talk on prosody for the Sound Studies Institute lecture series. You can see a recording of it here (on youtube). Thanks again to Scott Smallwood and Tom Merklinger for inviting and hosting me!