The majority of research on prosody in conversation to date has focused on exploring the role of individual prosodic features, such as certain types of pitch accent, pitch register or voice quality, for the accomplishment of specified social actions. From this research the picture emerges that when it comes to the implementation of specific…

Results arising from a prosodic and interactional study of the organization of everyday talk in English suggest that news receipts can be grouped into two categories: valenced (e.g., "oh good") and non-valenced (e.g., "oh really"). In-depth investigation of both valenced and non-valenced news receipts shows that differences in their prosodic…

In order to explore the influence of context on the phonetic design of talk-in-interaction, we investigated the pitch characteristics of short turns (insertions) that are produced by one speaker between turns from another speaker. We investigated the hypothesis that the speaker of the insertion designs her turn as a pitch match to the prior turn…

Fragmentation between formal and functional approaches to prosodic variation is an ongoing problem in linguistic research. In particular, the frameworks of the Phonetics of Talk-in-Interaction (PTI) and Empirical Phonology (EP) take very different theoretical and methodological approaches to this kind of variation. We argue that it is fruitful to…

The presented study is aimed at investigating the interaction of palatalization and intrinsic prosodic features of the vowel in CVC (consonant+vowel+consonant) syllables in Russian. The universal nature of intrinsic prosodic vowel features was confirmed with the data from the Russian language. It was found that palatalization of the consonants…

Three categorization experiments investigated whether the speaking rate of a preceding sentence influences durational cues to the perception of suprasegmental lexical-stress patterns. Dutch two-syllable word fragments had to be judged as coming from one of two longer words that matched the fragment segmentally but differed in lexical stress…

This study focuses on prosodic evolution in the French news announcer style, based on acoustic and perceptual analysis of French audiovisual archives. A 10-hour corpus covering six decades of broadcast news is investigated automatically. Two prosodic features, which may give an impression of emphatic style, are explored: word-initial stress and…

The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs.…

Examines two empirical issues regarding conversational exchange: what it is about talk that helps next speakers recognize that current speakers have finished and why overlap occurs if precise mechanisms exist to help speakers project turn completion. Distinguishes between contributions from dialog partners that are turn-competitive versus those…

The mathematical models of intonation used in speech technology are often inaccessible to linguists. By the same token, phonological descriptions of intonation are rarely used by speech technologists, as they cannot be implemented directly in applications. Consequently, these research communities do not benefit much from each other's insights. In…

Approaches prosody as one set of resources and practices among many by which participants interactively produce conversation and other talk-in interaction, examining three episodes of conversation that exemplify different orders of organization in which prosodic practices may be implicated. Reflects on what is needed for students of conversation…

Investigated the functions of dynamic speech rates as contextualization cues in conversational Japanese, examining five spontaneous task-oriented dialogs and analyzing the potential of speech-rate changes in signaling the structure of the information being exchanged. Results found a correlation between speech decelerations and the openings of new…

Investigated whether current approaches to automatically classifying dialog acts (DAs) in natural conversation could be improved by adding prosodic information. Using conversations from the switchboard corpus, researchers annotated DAs, automatically extracting prosodic features for each DA. Results indicated that DAs are redundantly marked in…

Introduces a special issue that includes papers which focus on the relationship between prosody and conversation. The papers represent different research traditions (e.g., the ethnomethodological framework of dialog analyses and report case studies, quantitative study of large corpora, experimental research using elicited or constructed speech…

Two experiments are reported in which the presence or absence of silence was found to be a relevant cue for the distinction between affricate and fricative when it occurred in sentence-medial position, but not when it occurred at a sentence boundary. (Author/AMH)