The biennial meeting of the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group (SProSIG) of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) is the only recurring international conference focused on prosody as an organizing principle for the social, psychological, linguistic, and technological aspects of spoken language. Speech Prosody 2012, in particular, seeks to discuss the communicative aspects of prosody. To what extent can the observed features and qualities of prosody be modeled to facilitate technological developments? As an interdisciplinary conference by nature, Speech Prosody 2012 especially welcomes papers that adapt qualitative description with quantitative analysis, and papers that adapt models of prosody to communicative situations.