About

Welcome!

My name is Csilla Tatár [‘t͡ʃilːɒ ‘tɒtaːr] (she / her), I graduated with a PhD in Linguistics from the Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor in the summer of 2026.

In my work, I focus on exploring the connection between meaning (semantics, pragmatics) and form (prosody, phonetics, gesture) via experimental and theoretical means. Broadly, my interests are:

  • the intersection of information structure with prosody and co-speech gesture
  • the semantics and prosody of Hungarian and English varieties
  • production and perception of speaker attitude and intention; both in the general population and in individuals on the autism spectrum

My dissertation research is centered around the prosodic and information structural underpinnings of speech and co-speech gesture alignment in Hungarian. The dissertation is available here.

Email: cstatar [at] umich [dot] edu

Recent news

DISSERTATION AVAILABLE
October 2026
Click to see the full text of my dissertation.

DISSERTATION DEFENSE
July 2026
I successfully defended my dissertation titled “The Prosodic and Information Structural Underpinnings of Speech and Co-speech Gesture Alignment in Hungarian.” I owe a debt of gratitude to my wonderful co-chairs, Ezra Keshet and Jelena Krivokapić.

CONFERENCE & PUBLICATION
May 2026
Prelimiary results of my dissertation study have been accepted to Speech Prosody 2026. Proceedings paper.

COLLOQUIUM TALK
April 2026
I presented my dissertation at the Linguistics Graduate Student Colloquium at UMich.

CONFERENCE
February 2026
Prelimiary results of my dissertation study have been presented at the DGfS 2026

PUBLICATION
January 2026
My research project on the prosody of sarcasm and its perception by neurodiverse populations appears in the Journal of the International Phonetics Association. The paper is co-authored with my advisors, Ezra Keshet, Jonathan R. Brennan, and Jelena Krivokapić.

CONFERENCE
December 2025
Preliminary results of my dissertation have been presented at the Formal Linguistic Approaches to MultiModality (FLAMM) conference.