Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Finland
fellow
Tatiana Kachkovskaia
Home institution
University of Helsinki
Country of origin (home institution)
Finland
Discipline(s)
Language sciences and linguistics
Theme(s)
Behavior & Cognition
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Tatiana Kachkovskaia is a linguist specializing in phonetics and speech prosody with strong background in the analysis of speech signal. She defended her PhD in 2015 at the Department of Phonetics, St. Petersburg State University, with her research focused on segmental duration in connected speech. In the following years, she worked at the same department as a researcher and, later, an associate professor. Since 2023 Kachkovskaia has been teaching part-time at the University of Helsinki. In recent years, her research interests have focused on exploring inter-speaker variation and cross-linguistic influence in intonation.
Research Project
Socially-Induced Variation in Intonation
Very often, a person’s speech varies according to the social situation. One of the underlying mechanisms of these changes is probably the human ability to mimic, or copy, other humans’ behaviour. Although such accommodation often occurs automatically, it is an important way to establish social relations. This project is part of an on-going research started in 2019 and is aimed at searching for patterns of communication accommodation in human speech depending on the relationship between the interlocutors in a dialogue (compare, e.g., a conversation between siblings and a dialogue between two strangers). In the previous years, Kachkovskaia and her colleagues managed to show how this relationship influences speech tempo and pausing, vowel quality and the occurrence of some paralinguistic events (e.g. laughter and fillers, e.g. “uhm…”). Kachkovskaia’s current project is focused on intonation, i.e., the melodic aspect of speech. Using a large annotated corpus of dialogue speech and modern tools for prosodic analysis, she is looking for systematic variation in the “tunes” that each speaker uses in conversations with different interlocutors.
Research Interests:
Phonetics; speech prosody; intonation; sociophonetics