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…

This paper investigates hearers' use of response tokens (back-channels), in maintaining and differentiating their actions. Initial observations suggest that hearers produce a sequence of phonetically similar responses to disengage from the current topic, and dissimilar responses to engage with the current topic. This is studied systematically by…

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 grammar books, the various functions of "and" as phrasal coordinator and clausal conjunction are treated as standard knowledge. In addition, studies on the uses of "and" in everyday talk-in-interaction have described its discourse-organizational functions on a more global level. In the phonetic literature, in turn, a range of phonetic forms of…

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…

The empirical focus of this paper is a conversational turn-taking phenomenon in which conjunctions produced immediately after a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion are treated by co-participants as points of possible completion and transition relevance. The data for this study are audio-video recordings of 5 unscripted…

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…

In a data set of 291 spontaneous utterances from German 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds and adults, nuclear pitch contours were labeled manually using the GToBI annotation system. Ten different contour types were identified.The fundamental frequency (F0) of these contours was modeled using third-order orthogonal polynomials, following an approach similar…

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…

Previous research has argued that fundamental frequency is a critical component of phonetic accommodation. We tested this hypothesis in an auditory naming task with two conditions. Participants in an Unfiltered Condition completed an auditory naming task with a single male model talker. A second group of participants was assigned to a Filtered…

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…

Two experiments investigated the way acoustic markers of prominence influence the grouping of speech sequences by adults and 7-month-old infants. In the first experiment, adults were familiarized with and asked to memorize sequences of adjacent syllables that alternated in either pitch or duration. During the test phase, participants heard pairs…

The cross modal repetition priming paradigm was used to investigate how potential lexically ambiguous no-release variants are processed. In particular we focus on segmental regularities that affect the variant's frequency of occurrence (voicing of the critical segment) and phonological context in which the variant occurs (status of the following…

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.…