Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore when and how Mandarin-speaking children use contextual cues to normalize speech variability in perceiving lexical tones. Two different cognitive mechanisms underlying speech normalization (lower level acoustic normalization and higher level acoustic-phonemic normalization) were investigated through the…

This dissertation presents three studies that examined issues related to the production and the perception of pitch in a tone language. The first study examined linguistic contexts that may modulate consonant-induced pitch perturbations (CF0) in a tone language. Previous studies have produced mixed findings regarding the role of linguistic…

Context and discourse intonation have major influence on intended meaning in English-medium product advertisements on radio and television in Nigeria. Previous studies on Nigerian English phonology have confirmed the appropriate use of stress and intonation as the main challenge which many Nigerian speakers of English as a second language hardly…

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…

Tennis scores represent a natural language domain that offers the unique opportunity to study the effects of discourse constraints on prosody with strict control over syntactic and lexical variation. This study analyzed a set of tennis scores, such as "30-15," from live recordings of several Wimbledon and Davis Cup matches. The objective was to…