Volume 62, Issue 2-4

Despite much research, disagreements abound regarding the detailed charac-teristicsof question intonation in different languages or even in the same language.The present study investigates question intonation in Mandarin by also consideringthe role of focus that is frequently ignored in previous research. In experiment 1,native speakers of Mandarin produced statements, yes/no questions, particle ques-tions,wh-questions, rhetorical questions and confirmation questions with narrowfocus on the initial, medial or final word of the sentence, or on none of the words.Detailed F0 contour analyses showed that focus generated the same pitch rangemodification in questions as in statements, i.e., expanding the pitch range of thefocused word, suppressing (compressing and lowering) that of the post-focuswords, but leaving that of the pre-focus words largely unaffected. When the effects offocus (as well as other functions also potentially present) were controlled by sub-tractingstatement F0 contours from those of the corresponding yes/no questions,the resulting difference curves resembled exponential or even double-exponentialfunctions. Further F0 analyses also revealed an interaction between focus andinterrogative meaning in the form of a boost to the pitch raising by the question start-ingfrom the focused word. Finally, subtle differences in the amount of pitch raisingwere also observed among different types of questions, especially at the sentence-finalposition. Experiment 2 investigated whether listeners could detect both focusand question in the same utterance. Results showed that listeners could identifyboth in most cases, indicating that F0 variations related to the two functions could besimultaneously transmitted. Meanwhile, the lowest identification rates were foundfor neutral focus in questions and for statements with final focus. In both cases, theconfusions seemed to arise from the competing F0 adjustments by interrogativemeaning and focus at the sentence-final position. These findings are consistent withthe functional view of intonation, according to which components of intonation aredefined and organized by individual communicative functions that are independentof each other but are encoded in parallel.

A new research paradigm is applied to F0 synchronization with articulation, inpeak and valley contours, under four principles: (a) Timing of F0 contours enters thedefinitions of the pitch categories. (b) These phonetic exponents are linked to com-municativefunctions. (c) The listener plays a pivotal role. (d) Contextualization oftest stimuli is essential for pitch data collection. Data are presented and interpretedfrom an experimental investigation of the substance-function relationship in theperception of peak and valley shift series by German listeners, using the semanticdifferential technique. The findings of the substance-function relationship areexplained with reference to the frequency codeand to auditory enhancement,i.e.syntagmatic contrast of high-low or low-high pitch trajectories in synchronizationwith articulatory landmarks of accented syllables.

This study explores whether speaker emotion influences communicative effectiveness. Two hundred participants rated their current emotional state and gave a description of a route on a simple map. The quality of the linguistic content of the descriptions was assessed using Latent Semantic Analysis. Six hundred participants provided route drawings based on the map descriptions. Median route deviation served as a measure of communicative effectiveness. Eighty addi-tional participants rated invariant parts of the descriptions for perceived speaker happiness. Path analysis revealed that while speaker emotion did not affect the linguistic content of the descriptions, it had an effect on communicative effective-ness both through the effects of vocal cues directly as well as mediated by per-ceived happiness of speech. Specifically, higher first formants were associated with higher reported and perceived happiness as well as higher communicative effectiveness. Jitter, on the other hand, was negatively related to the perception of happiness and positively related to communicative effectiveness. These findings suggest that mood-related modulation of phonation and articulation can influence the effectiveness of communication in addition to message content.

We describe and exemplify a methodology for providing an integratedaccount of the communicative function of parametric phonetic detail and its rela-tionshipwith interactional organization. We exemplify our analytic approach bydocumenting two different phonetic designs of stand-alone ‘so’ in a corpus ofrecorded American English telephone conversations. These two designs - whichencompass particular loudness, pitch and laryngeal characteristics - correlate withdifferent communicative functions and have different consequences for the inter-actional-sequential organization of the talk. We argue that if phonology is to betruly concerned with function and linguistic contrast, we need to induce thosefunctions and domains of contrast from a thoroughgoing phonetic and sequentialanalysis of talk-in-interaction.

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the distribution of phonetic variants of the Dutch discourse marker eigenlijk, combining phonetic and conversation analytic methods. The paper shows that the phonetic form of eigenlijkdepends to some extent on the sequential environment in which the item is used; moreover, it shows that in the case of two such environments, the forms of eigenlijk are representative of tempo and reduction patterns spanning entire turns or turn-constructional units. These patterns can be related to the interactive function of the turns; thus, the findings presented here contribute to our as yet limited knowledge of the phonetic correlates of communicative actions.

This study investigates the relationship between word repetition, predictabil-ityfrom neighbouring words, and articulatory reduction in Dutch. For the sevenmost frequent words ending in the adjectival suffix -lijk, 40 occurrences were ran-domlyselected from a large database of face-to-face conversations. Analysis ofthe selected tokens showed that the degree of articulatory reduction (as measuredby duration and number of realized segments) was affected by repetition, pre-dictabilityfrom the previous word and predictability from the following word.Interestingly, not all of these effects were significant across morphemes and tar-getwords. Repetition effects were limited to suffixes, while effects of predictabil-ityfrom the previous word were restricted to the stems of two of the seven targetwords. Predictability from the following word affected the stems of all targetwords equally, but not all suffixes. The implications of these findings for models ofspeech production are discussed.

This paper considers the communicative function of final rises in Finnishconversational talk between pairs of teenage girls. Final rises are fairly common,occurring approximately twice a minute, predominantly on declaratives and in nar-rativesequences. We briefly consider the interplay between voice quality (known tobe a marker of transition relevance) and rising intonation in Finnish. We argue that innarrative sequences, rising terminals manage two main interactional tasks: they pro-videa place for a coparticipant to mark recipiency, and they project more talk by thecurrent speaker. Using a methodology which combines phonetic observation withconversation analysis, we demonstrate participants’ orientation to these functions.

Acoustic features and communicative functions of phrase-final F0 rises startingbefore an accented-vowel onset are analysed in a corpus of German unscriptedspeech. Two conversational conditions are examined: turn-yielding and turn-holding.The most important feature distinguishing rises in these two conditions is therange proportion, which differentiates between two patterns as follows: (1) raisedpitch on the accented syllable and restrained pitch movement in the tail of thecontour, (2) lowered pitch on the accented syllable and extended pitch movementin the tail. The first pattern is seen as a restrictivegesture, e.g. preventing the dia-loguepartner from turn taking. The second one is viewed as an activatinggesture,inviting the coparticipant to contribute.

This study investigates an intonation contour of German whose status has notbeen established yet: a globally falling contour with a slight rise at the very end ofthe phrase (FSR). The contour may be said to lie on a phonetic continuum betweenfalling (F) and falling-rising (FR) contours. It is hypothesized that F, FR and FSR dif-ferwith respect to their communicative functions: F is terminal, FR is non-terminal,and FSR is pseudo-terminal, respectively. The hypotheses were tested in two steps.First, measurements in a labelled corpus of spontaneous speech provided the nec-essarybackground information on the phonetics of the contours. In the secondstep, the general hypothesis was approached in a perceptual experiment using theparadigm of a semantic differential: 49 listeners judged 17 systematically gener-atedstimuli on nine semantic scales, such as ‘impolite/polite’. The hypotheses weregenerally confirmed. Both F and FSR were associated with a conclusive statement,while FR was more likely to be judged as marking a question. FSR differs from F inthat it does not express features such as categoricalness, dominance or impolite-ness.The results are interpreted as an instance of the frequency code: the additionof a slight rise means avoidance of extremely low F0 ; the functional consequence isa reduction of communicated dominance.

This paper investigates prosodic aspects of turn-taking in conversation with aview to improving the efficiency of identifying relevant places at which a machinecan legitimately begin to talk to a human interlocutor. It examines the relationshipbetween interaction control, the communicative function of which is to regulatethe flow of information between interlocutors, and its phonetic manifestation.Specifically, the listener’s perception of such interaction control phenomena ismodelled. Algorithms for automatic online extraction of prosodic phenomenaliable to be relevant for interaction control, such as silent pauses and intonationpatterns, are presented and evaluated in experiments using Swedish map taskdata. We show that the automatically extracted prosodic features can be used toavoid many of the places where current dialogue systems run the risk of interrupt-ingtheir users, as well as to identify suitable places to take the turn.

It is well known that speech errors in normal and aphasic speakers share cer-tain key characteristics. Traditionally, many of these errors are regarded as serial misorderings of abstract phonological segments, which maintain the phonetic well-formedness of the utterance. The current paper brings together the results of several articulatory studies undertaken independently for both subject popula-tions. These show that, in an error, instead of one segment substituting for another, two segments are often produced simultaneously even though only one segment may be heard. Such data pose problems for current models of speech production by suggesting that the commonly assumed dichotomous distinction between phonological and phonetic errors may not be tenable in the current form or may even be altogether redundant.