JANA DANKOVICOVA'S HOME PAGE

Contact information: Address:  Dr. J. Dankovicova Human Communication Department University College London Chandler House 2, Wakefield Street London WC1N 1PG, U.K. Telephone: ++44 - 020 - 7679 4173/4200 Fax: ++44 - 020 - 7713 0861 E-mail: j.dankovicova@ucl.ac.uk

At present I work in the Department of Human Communication Science as a lecturer in Clinical Linguistics. I am a phonetician by training but my interests extend to neurolinguistics and cognitive neuropsychology of language. My main area of interest in phonetics is speech prosody (articulation rate, intonation, rhythm). This includes working towards a theory of articulation rate variation, applications of prosody in speech technology (modelling intonation and articulation rate variation) and clinical applications. In the area of clinical research, my main interest is 'foreign accent syndrome'.

Research:

• ProSynth
  ProSynth stands for "An integrated prosodic approach to device-independent, natural-sounding speech synthesis" and it is a collaborative EPSRC research project held by University College London, the University of Cambridge and the University of York. In 1998-99 I was involved in the project as a research fellow, working with Jill House and Mark Huckvale, UCL, on modelling intonation. I continue being involved in the project though at the moment just informally - out of interest.
  

• Foreign accent syndrome
  'Foreign accent syndrome' can be defined as a relatively rare neurological disorder that involves foreign-sounding speech, usually following a stroke.
  My interest in FAS began when I worked as a Research Assistant with John C. Marshall and Jennifer Gurd in the Neuropsychology Unit, Department of Clinical Neurology and the Phonetics Laboratory, University of Oxford. The case study I worked on involved a woman who before stroke spoke Southern British English but after stroke appeared to speak with a Scottish accent. The investigation consisted of impressionistic phonetic and, particularly, acoustic analyses of her speech both before and after the stroke, and comparing the two. The main questions were whether the speaker is consistently using a particular Scottish accent, or whether she only appears to listeners to be speaking Scottish English, and if so, what the characteristics of her speech responsible for this impression are. A collaborative paper on this case has been submitted to Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics.
  

• Articulation rate variation
  This research stems directly from my PhD dissertation (1998, University of Oxford; abstract) and M.Phil. dissertation (1994, University of Oxford). Both concern articulation rate variation in Czech (an extended version of the M.Phil. pilot study was published in the Journal of Phonetics, 1997). A pilot study on English is included in the paper published in the Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1999, San Francisco.
  

List of publications

For information about my background and teaching experience see my  C.V.
 

Last revised:    February 2000