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Abstract: In spontaneous, conversational speech, words are often reduced compared to their citation forms, such that a word like yesterday may sound like . The present chapter investigates such acoustic reduction. The study of reduction needs large corpora that are transcribed phonetically. The first part of this chapter describes an automatic transcription procedure used to obtain such a large phonetically transcribed corpus of Dutch spontaneous dialogues, which is subsequently used for the investigation of acoustic reduction. First, the orthographic transcriptions were adapted for automatic processing. Next, the phonetic transcription of the corpus was created by means of a forced alignment using a lexicon with multiple pronunciation variants per word. These variants were generated by applying phonological and reduction rules to the canonical phonetic transcriptions of the words. The second part of this chapter reports the results of a quantitative analysis of reduction in the corpus on the basis of the generated transcriptions and gives an inventory of segmental reductions in standard Dutch. Overall, we found that reduction is more pervasive in spontaneous Dutch than previously documented. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• first analysis of prosodic configurations mapped to information structural categories in Egyptian Arabic. • statistical analysis of holistic f0 contours with GAMMs and analysis of the interaction of acoustic features across the utterance with FPCA. • results yield a tentative prosodic focus-background construction across speakers, which is not applied by all speakers and thus not fully conventionalized for this specific purpose. • high inter-speaker variability is found and speaker-specific strategies are identified through reconstructions for individual speakers using FPCA. This paper investigates the prosody of sentences elicited in three Information Structure (IS) conditions: all-new, theme-rheme and rhematic focus-background. The sentences were produced by 18 speakers of Egyptian Arabic (EA). This is the first quantitative study to provide a comprehensive analysis of holistic f0 contours (by means of GAMM) and configurations of f0, duration and intensity (by means of FPCA) associated with the three IS conditions, both across and within speakers. A significant difference between focus-background and the other information structure conditions was found, but also strong inter-speaker variation in terms of strategies and the degree to which these strategies were applied. The results suggest that post-focus register lowering and the duration of the stressed syllables of the focused and the utterance-final word are more consistent cues to focus than a higher peak of the focus accent. In addition, some independence of duration and intensity from f0 could be identified. These results thus support the assumption that, when focus is marked prosodically in EA, it is marked by prominence. Nevertheless, the fact that a considerable number of EA speakers did not apply prosodic marking and the fact that prosodic focus marking was gradient rather than categorical suggest that EA does not have a fully conventionalized prosodic focus construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]