The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz published an article on SPOT in December: “NSF Grant Supports Linguistics Research at UCSC through SPOT Project.”

Linguistics Professors Junko Ito and Armin Mester were recently awarded a multi-year NSF grant on Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (abbreviated as “SPOT”) that will propel work on the project through 2020.

Within the field of linguistics, syntax and prosody are well understood concepts, but for those of us outside the field, it takes some introduction. Simply put, syntax is sentence structure, and prosody is the sound structure of spoken language. Prosody — the stress, pitch, and grouping structure (pauses) we impose through speaking — gives audible form to the abstract syntactic structure, in a way that supplies the listener with crucial cues to the intended meaning of each utterance. […]

Read the whole article at https://thi.ucsc.edu/nsf-grant-supports-linguistics-research-ucsc-spot-project/?sf_paged=3.