Research

Recent projects:

PROSODY, CO-SPEECH GESTURES, AND INFORMATION STRUCTURE
I am currently working on my dissertation project on the prosodic and information structural underpinnings of speech and co-speech gesture coordination in Hungarian, examining the roles of pragmatic and prosodic prominence, as well as prosodic boundaries on gestural coordination.

• Preliminary results were presented at theFormal Linguistic Approaches to MultiModality (FLAMM) conference at Trinity College Dublin and at DGfS 2026 at the University of Trier.
• Preliminary results are accepted to be publised in the proceedings of Speech Prosody 2026.

PERCEPTION OF SARCASTIC PROSODY IN NEURODIVERSE POPULATIONS
In a production and perception study, I investigated the prosodic characteristics of sarcasm utterance-initially, wherein the lexical choices of a speaker do not signal sarcasm to a listener yet, and the contribution of negative affect thus expressed to making the pragmatic inference from sincerity to sarcasm in listeners who self-identify and who do not self-identify as being on the autism spectrum. [Advisors: Ezra Keshet, Jonathan Brennan, Jelena Krivokapić]

• The project was presented at the 13th International Student Poster Presentation Conference (Eötvös Loránd University), the 43rd TABU Dag (University of Groningen), and at Acoustics 2023 Sydney (ASA).
• The study has been published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association.

PROSODY OF SARCASM
In a production study, I examined the time-varying measures of F0 in speech produced with sarcastic affect. The project compared ways of quantifying the phonetic correlates of sarcasm focusing on two novel measures, wiggliness and spaciousness, neither of which has been examined in affective prosody before. These were compared to further F0 variability measures and were evaluated for their role in distinguishing sarcasm via contour clustering.

• The project was presented at the ASA in Ottawa and at Speech Prosody 2024 (see proceedings below).

MASTERS THESIS: A DYNAMIC SEMANTIC ACCOUNT OF CATAPHORA
My MA research at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary) centered around the semantics of pronouns and their treatment in formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. In my MA thesis, I focused on the semantics of cataphoric structures in English, and touched upon the possibility of representing cataphoric reference in a dynamic semantic framework. [Advisor: Mekis Péter]

• The study received an Outstanding Thesis Award.

Recent conferences:

• Tatár, Cs., Keshet, E., Krivokapić, J. (2026, May 26-29). Examining the role of prosody and information structure in Hungarian speech and co-speech gestural coordination: An EMA study. Speech Prosody 2026, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
• Tatár, Cs., Keshet, E., Krivokapić, J. (2026, February 25-27). Speech and co-speech gesture coordination in Hungarian: The role of prosody & information structure. [Talk] DGfS26 AG: Visual patterns in the phonetics of gestures,Trier University, Trier, Germany.
• Tatár, Cs., Krivokapić, J., Keshet, E. (2025, December 4-5). An examination of the prosodic and information structural underpinnings of speech and co-speech gesture alignment in Hungarian. [Poster presentation] Formal Linguistic Approaches to MultiModality (FLAMM), Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
• Tatár, Cs., Brennan, J. R., Krivokapić, J., Keshet, E. Examining melodiousness in sarcasm: Wiggliness, spaciousness, and contour clustering. [Talk]. Speech Prosody 2024, July 2-5, Leiden, The Netherlands.
  Link to proceedings
• Tatár, Cs., Brennan, J. R., Krivokapić, J., Keshet, E. (2024, May 13-17). Examining the time-varying measures of F0 in sarcasm: Wiggliness, spaciousness, and contour clustering [Poster presentation]. 186th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Ottawa, Canada. 
  https://acousticalsociety.org/ottawa/