Exploring and explaining variation in phrase-final f0 movements in spontaneous Papuan Malay.

This study investigates the variation in phrase-final f0 movements found in dyadic unscripted conversations in Papuan Malay, an Eastern Indonesian language. This is done by a novel combination of exploratory and confirmatory classification techniques. In particular, this study investigates the linguistic factors that potentially drive f0 contour variation in phrase-final words produced in a naturalistic interactive dialogue task.

The Attractiveness of Average Speech Rhythms: Revisiting the Average Effect From a Crosslinguistic Perspective.

The current study investigates the average effect: the tendency for humans to appreciate an averaged (face, bird, wristwatch, car, and so on) over an individual instance. The effect holds across cultures, despite varying conceptualizations of attractiveness. While much research has been conducted on the average effect in visual perception, much less is known about the extent to which this effect applies to language and speech.

Intonation contour similarity: f0 representations and distance measures compared to human perception in two languages.

Recently, cluster analysis on f0 contours has become a popular method in phonetic research. Cluster analysis provides an automated way of categorising f0 contours, which gives new insights into (phonological) categories of intonation that vary across languages. As cluster analysis can be performed in many different ways, it is important to understand the extent to which these analyses can capture human perception of f0.

The role of f0 shape and phrasal position in Papuan Malay and American English word identification.

The prosodic structure of under-researched languages in the Trade Malay language family is poorly understood. Although boundary marking has been uncontroversially shown as the major prosodic function in these languages, studies on the use of pitch accents to highlight important words in a phrase remain inconclusive. In addition, most knowledge of pitch accents is based on well-researched languages such as the ones from the Western-Germanic language family.

Lexical analyses of the function and phonology of Papuan Malay word stress.

The existence of word stress in Indonesian languages has been controversial. Recent acoustic analyses of Papuan Malay suggest that this language has word stress, counter to other studies and unlike closely related languages. The current study further investigates Papuan Malay by means of lexical (non-acoustic) analyses of two different aspects of word stress.

Demarcating and highlighting in Papuan Malay phrase prosody.

Phrase-level prosody serves two essential functions in many languages of the world: chunking information into units (demarcating) and marking important information (highlighting). Recent work suggests that prosody has a mainly demarcating function in the Trade Malay language family. That is, the use of pitch accents in these languages is limited or absent, as the main prosodic events occur on the final two syllables in a phrase.

Offline and online processing of acoustic cues to word stress in Papuan Malay.

The present study investigates to what extent acoustic cues to word stress facilitate both offline and online word processing in Papuan Malay. Previous production research has shown acoustic evidence for word-stress patterns in this language, counter to earlier predictions. A discussion of the literature on word stress perception and word stress in Papuan Malay is provided and complemented with reports of three word recognition tasks.

Repetition Reduction Revisited: The Prosody of Repeated Words in Papuan Malay.

It has frequently been shown that speakers prosodically reduce repeated words in discourse. This phenomenon has been claimed to facilitate speech recognition and to be language universal. In particular, the relationship between the information value of a word in a discourse context and its prosodic prominence have been shown to correlate.

Which Language R You Speaking? /r/ as a Language Marker in Tyrolean and Italian Bilinguals.

Across languages of the world the /r/ sound is known for its variability. This variability has been investigated using articulatory models as well as in sociolinguistic studies. The current study investigates to what extent /r/ is a marker of a bilingual's dominant language.

White bear effects in language production: evidence from the prosodic realization of adjectives.

A central problem in recent research on speech production concerns the question to what extent speakers adapt their linguistic expressions to the needs of their addressees. It is claimed that speakers sometimes leak information about objects that are only visible for them and not for their listeners. Previous research only takes the occurrence of adjectives as evidence for the leakage of privileged information.

Accounting for the listener: comparing the production of contrastive intonation in typically-developing speakers and speakers with autism.

The present research investigates what drives the prosodic marking of contrastive information. For example, a typically developing speaker of a Germanic language like Dutch generally refers to a pink car as a "PINK car" (accented words in capitals) when a previously mentioned car was red. The main question addressed in this paper is whether contrastive intonation is produced with respect to the speaker's or (also) the listener's perspective on the preceding discourse.

On how accent distribution can signal speaker adaptation.

Some dialogues are perceived as running more smoothly than others. To some extent that impression could be related to how well speakers adapt their prosody to each other. Adaptation in prosody can be signaled by the use of pitch accents that indicate how utterances are structurally related to those of the interlocutor (prosodic function) or by copying the interlocutor's prosodic features (prosodic form).