Special Sessions

Basing on proposals which the Organizing Committee received, following special sessions were planned. All potential contributors were encouraged to submit corresponding papers.

	Auditory-Visual Prosody Processing Organizers: Marc Swerts, Denis Burnham and Sascha Fagel This session focuses on auditory-visual aspects of prosody processing.
	Understanding emotions in speech: neural and cross-cultural evidence Organizers: Sonja A. Kotz and Marc D. Pell The overriding goal of this special session is to provide insight into human processes for understanding emotions from speech prosody, their neural bases, and the influences of cultural shaping factors on vocal emotion recognition.
	Prosody in Automatic Speech Recognition Organizer: Sin-Horng Chen This session focuses on applications of prosodic knowledge to automatic speech recognition.
	Articulatory-Functional Approaches to Speech Prosody Organizer: Yi Xu This special session is aimed at fostering understanding of speech prosody from two perspectives that have not always been the focus of the mainstream approaches: articulatory mechanisms and communicative functions, and at exploring in particular the possibility that the two are linked to each other more directly than has been generally recognized.
	Prosody and Affective Computing Organizers: Noam Amir, Nick Campbell and Jianhua Tao This session focuses on all aspects of affect and its connection with prosodic parameters.