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This study investigated the role of contextual and prosodic information in turn-end estimation by means of a button-press task. We presented participants with turns extracted from a corpus of telephone calls visually (i.e., in transcribed form, word-by-word) and auditorily, and asked them to anticipate turn ends by pressing a button. The availability of the previous conversational context was generally helpful for turn-end estimation in short turns only, and more clearly so in the visual task than in the auditory task. To investigate the role of prosody, we examined whether participants in the auditory task pressed the button close to turn-medial points likely to constitute turn ends based on lexico-syntactic information alone. We observed that the vast majority of such button presses occurred in the presence of an intonational boundary rather than in its absence. These results are consistent with the view that prosodic cues in the proximity of turn ends play a relevant role in turn-end estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores phrase-length-related alternations in the association of tones to positions in metrical structure in two melodic constructions of Spanish. An imitation-and-completion task eliciting (a) the low–falling–rising contour and (b) the circumflex contour on intonation phrases (IPs) of one, two, and three prosodic words revealed that, although the focus structure and pragmatic context is constant across conditions, phrases containing one prosodic word differ in their nuclear (i.e. final) pitch accents and edge tones from phrases containing more than one prosodic word. For contour (a), short intonation phrases (e.g. [Manolo]IP) were produced with a low accent followed by a high edge tone (L* H% in ToBI notation), whereas longer phrases (e.g. [El hermano de la amiga de Manolo]IP ‘Manolo's friend's brother’) had a low accent on the first stressed syllable, a rising accent on the last stressed syllable, and a low edge tone (L* L+H* L%). For contour (b), short phrases were produced with a high–rise (L+H* ¡H%), whereas longer phrases were produced with an initial accentual rise followed by an upstepped rise–fall (L+H* ¡H* L%). These findings imply that the common practice of describing the structure of intonation contours as consisting of a constant nuclear pitch accent and following edge tone is not adequate for modeling Spanish intonation. To capture the observed melodic alternations, we argue for clearer separation between tones and metrical structure, whereby intonational tones do not necessarily have an intrinsic culminative or delimitative function (i.e. as pitch accents or as edge tones). Instead, this function results from melody-specific principles of tonal–metrical association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Vocal reactions to the offset of speech-like stimuli are longer than reactions to stimulus onsets. • Speaking latencies decrease as prosodic cues appear further away from stimulus ends. • Slower speech rates produced slower responses for stimuli lacking prosodic cues. • Turn transitions taking less than 200 ms are unlikely to involve reactions to the end of a turn. • Turn transitions taking less than 200 ms can be achieved when turn-final prosodic cues are available. Everyday conversation is characterized by a rapid alternation of turns among successive speakers. We investigate vocal reaction times to speech offsets in order to shed light on the limits of reactive behavior in conversational turn-taking. Twenty-three speakers of Dutch produced a prepared response ([ja], 'yes') as fast as possible in response to (a) the onset of a pure tone preceded by a variable amount of silence, and (b) the offset of several types of speech-like auditory stimuli varying in duration, prosodic characteristics, and speech rate. Reactions to the offset of stimuli lacking final prosodic cues were significantly longer than reactions to stimulus onsets (283 vs. 215 ms on average), and were rare below 200 ms (3%). Speaking latencies decreased as prosodic cues appeared further away from the stimulus end. Slowing down the speech rate produced an entrainment effect (i.e. slower responses) for stimuli lacking prosodic cues vs. a facilitatory effect (i.e. faster responses) when prosodic cues were present. These findings suggest that smooth turn transitions taking less than 200 ms are unlikely to involve reactions to silence at the end of a turn, but that they can be achieved when turn-final prosodic cues are available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conversation, turn transitions between speakers often occur smoothly, usually within a time window of a few hundred milliseconds. It has been argued, on the basis of a button-press experiment [De Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., & Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a speaker's turn: A cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language , 82 (3):515–535], that participants in conversation rely mainly on lexico-syntactic information when timing and producing their turns, and that they do not need to make use of intonational cues to achieve smooth transitions and avoid overlaps. In contrast to this view, but in line with previous observational studies, our results from a dialogue task and a button-press task involving questions and answers indicate that the identification of the end of intonational phrases is necessary for smooth turn-taking. In both tasks, participants never responded to questions (i.e., gave an answer or pressed a button to indicate a turn end) at turn-internal points of syntactic completion in the absence of an intonational phrase boundary. Moreover, in the button-press task, they often pressed the button at the same point of syntactic completion when the final word of an intonational phrase was cross-spliced at that location. Furthermore, truncated stimuli ending in a syntactic completion point but lacking an intonational phrase boundary led to significantly delayed button presses. In light of these results, we argue that earlier claims that intonation is not necessary for correct turn-end projection are misguided, and that research on turn-taking should continue to consider intonation as a source of turn-end cues along with other linguistic and communicative phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conversation-analytic research has argued that the timing and construction of preferred responding actions (e.g., acceptances) differ from that of dispreferred responding actions (e.g., rejections), potentially enabling early response prediction by recipients. We examined 195 preferred and dispreferred responding actions in telephone corpora and found that the timing of the most frequent cases of each type did not differ systematically. Only for turn transitions of 700 ms or more was the proportion of dispreferred responding actions clearly greater than that of preferreds. In contrast, an analysis of the timing that included turn formats (i.e., those with or without qualification) revealed clearer differences. Small departures from a normal gap duration decrease the likelihood of a preferred action in a preferred turn format (e.g., a simple “yes”). We propose that the timing of a response is best understood as a turn-constructional feature, the first virtual component of a preferred or dispreferred turn format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of phonetic contrasts and related phenomena, e.g. inter- and intra-speaker variability, often requires to analyse data in the form of measured time series, like f 0 contours and formant trajectories. As a consequence, the investigator has to find suitable ways to reduce the raw and abundant numerical information contained in a bundle of time series into a small but sufficient set of numerical descriptors of their shape. This approach requires one to decide in advance which dynamic traits to include in the analysis and which not. For example, a rising pitch gesture may be represented by its duration and slope, hence reducing it to a straight segment, or by a richer coding specifying also whether (and how much) the rising contour is concave or convex, the latter being irrelevant in some context but crucial in others. Decisions become even more complex when a phenomenon is described by a multidimensional time series, e.g. by the first two formants. In this paper we introduce a methodology based on Functional Data Analysis (FDA) that allows the investigator to delegate most of the decisions involved in the quantitative description of multidimensional time series to the data themselves. FDA produces a data-driven parametrisation of the main shape traits present in the data that is visually interpretable, in the same way as slopes or peak heights are. These output parameters are numbers that are amenable to ordinary statistical analysis, e.g. linear (mixed effects) models. FDA is also able to capture correlations among different dimensions of a time series, e.g. between formants F 1 and F 2 . We present FDA by means of an extended case study on diphthong – hiatus distinction in Spanish, a contrast that involves duration, formant trajectories and pitch contours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A word like Huh?–used as a repair initiator when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said– is found in roughly the same form and function in spoken languages across the globe. We investigate it in naturally occurring conversations in ten languages and present evidence and arguments for two distinct claims: that Huh? is universal, and that it is a word. In support of the first, we show that the similarities in form and function of this interjection across languages are much greater than expected by chance. In support of the second claim we show that it is a lexical, conventionalised form that has to be learnt, unlike grunts or emotional cries. We discuss possible reasons for the cross-linguistic similarity and propose an account in terms of convergent evolution. Huh? is a universal word not because it is innate but because it is shaped by selective pressures in an interactional environment that all languages share: that of other-initiated repair. Our proposal enhances evolutionary models of language change by suggesting that conversational infrastructure can drive the convergent cultural evolution of linguistic items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Western Andalusian Spanish (WAS), [h + voiceless stop] clusters are realized as long pre- and postaspirated stops. This study investigates if a new class of stops (realized as geminates with variable degrees of pre- and postaspiration) has emerged in this dialect, or if postaspiration in these clusters results from articulatory overlap. An experiment was carried out in which WAS speakers produced [h + voiceless stop] clusters under changes in speech rate and stress location. The duration of postaspiration, measured as voice onset, did not show systematic effects of any of the experimental variables. Moreover, trade-offs were observed between voice onset and preaspiration plus closure durations. These results indicate that postaspiration in WAS [h + voiceless stop] clusters is the consequence of extensive articulatory overlap. It is further hypothesized that the lengthening of closures in WAS stops preceded by [h] results from a different gestural mechanism affecting all [hC] clusters in this dialect. From a broader perspective, since extensive overlap and consonantal lengthening do not occur in the [hC] clusters of other Spanish varieties, these findings lend support to the idea that intergestural coordination patterns can be dialect-specific. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present study compares the realization of intervocalic voiceless stops and vowels surrounded by voiceless stops in conversational Spanish and French. Our data reveal significant differences in how these segments are realized in each language. Spanish voiceless stops tend to have shorter stop closures, display incomplete closures more often, and exhibit more voicing than French voiceless stops. As for vowels, more cases of complete devoicing and greater degrees of partial devoicing were found in French than in Spanish. Moreover, all French vowel types exhibit significantly lower F1 values than their Spanish counterparts. These findings indicate that the extent of reduction that a segment type can undergo in conversational speech can vary significantly across languages. Language differences in coarticulatory strategies and 'base-of-articulation' are discussed as possible causes of our observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study investigates the reduction of vowel /e/ in the French word c’était // ‘it was’. This reduction phenomenon appeared to be highly frequent, as more than half of the occurrences of this word in a corpus of casual French contained few or no acoustic traces of a vowel between [s] and [t]. All our durational analyses clearly supported a categorical absence of vowel /e/ in a subset of c’était tokens. This interpretation was also supported by our finding that the occurrence of complete elision and [e] duration in non-elision tokens were conditioned by different factors. However, spectral measures were consistent with the possibility that a highly reduced /e/ vowel is still present in elision tokens in spite of the durational evidence for categorical elision. We discuss how these findings can be reconciled, and conclude that acoustic analysis of uncontrolled materials can provide valuable information about the mechanisms underlying reduction phenomena in casual speech. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This article describes the preparation, recording and orthographic transcription of a new speech corpus, the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual French (NCCFr). The corpus contains a total of over 36h of recordings of 46 French speakers engaged in conversations with friends. Casual speech was elicited during three different parts, which together provided around 90min of speech from every pair of speakers. While Parts 1 and 2 did not require participants to perform any specific task, in Part 3 participants negotiated a common answer to general questions about society. Comparisons with the ESTER corpus of journalistic speech show that the two corpora contain speech of considerably different registers. A number of indicators of casualness, including swear words, casual words, verlan, disfluencies and word repetitions, are more frequent in the NCCFr than in the ESTER corpus, while the use of double negation, an indicator of formal speech, is less frequent. In general, these estimates of casualness are constant through the three parts of the recording sessions and across speakers. Based on these facts, we conclude that our corpus is a rich resource of highly casual speech, and that it can be effectively exploited by researchers in language science and technology. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper addresses the validity of the segmental anchoring hypothesis for tonal landmarks (henceforth, SAH) as described in recent work by (among others) Ladd, Faulkner, D., Faulkner, H., & Schepman [1999. Constant ‘segmental’ anchoring of f0 movements under changes in speech rate. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106, 1543–1554], Ladd [2003. Phonological conditioning of f0 target alignment. In: M. J. Solé, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of the XVth international congress of phonetic sciences, Vol. 1, (pp. 249–252). Barcelona: Causal Productions; in press. Segmental anchoring of pitch movements: Autosegmental association or gestural coordination? Italian Journal of Linguistics, 18 (1)]. The alignment of LH* prenuclear peaks with segmental landmarks in controlled speech materials in Peninsular Spanish is analyzed as a function of syllable structure type (open, closed) of the accented syllable, segmental composition, and speaking rate. Contrary to the predictions of the SAH, alignment was affected by syllable structure and speech rate in significant and consistent ways. In: CV syllables the peak was located around the end of the accented vowel, and in CVC syllables around the beginning-mid part of the sonorant coda, but still far from the syllable boundary. With respect to the effects of rate, peaks were located earlier in the syllable as speech rate decreased. The results suggest that the accent gestures under study are synchronized with the syllable unit. In general, the longer the syllable, the longer the rise time. Thus the fundamental idea of the anchoring hypothesis can be taken as still valid. On the other hand, the tonal alignment patterns reported here can be interpreted as the outcome of distinct modes of gestural coordination in syllable-initial vs. syllable-final position: gestures at syllable onsets appear to be more tightly coordinated than gestures at the end of syllables [Browman, C. P., & Goldstein, L.M. (1986). Towards an articulatory phonology. Phonology Yearbook, 3, 219–252; Browman, C. P., & Goldstein, L. (1988). Some notes on syllable structure in articulatory phonology. Phonetica, 45, 140–155; (1992). Articulatory Phonology: An overview. Phonetica, 49, 155–180; Krakow (1999). Physiological organization of syllables: A review. Journal of Phonetics, 27, 23–54; among others]. Intergestural timing can thus provide a unifying explanation for (1) the contrasting behavior between the precise synchronization of L valleys with the onset of the syllable and the more variable timing of the end of the f0 rise, and, more specifically, for (2) the right-hand tonal pressure effects and ‘undershoot’ patterns displayed by peaks at the ends of syllables and other prosodic domains. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Between the Mandarin flat-falling tonal contrast, F0 range imitation is non-linear while duration imitation is linear. • Phonological contrast mediates the imitation of 'supra-segmental' features. • Phonological mediation on imitation is dependent on cue primacy. • A Bayesian mixture model is used to examine the categorical imitation pattern. Phonetic imitation has been found to be mediated by phonological contrast. For features whose values vary around a phonological prototype, the imitation is distorted by the phonological category, i.e., the imitation is nonlinear. This phonological mediation effect was mostly found in segmental features such as VOT and formants. Supra-segmental features, on the contrary, are generally found to be easy to imitate, i.e., the imitation is linear. Nevertheless, whether the phonological effect exists in the imitation of supra-segmental features is not fully understood. This study, through an imitation experiment of Mandarin flat-falling tonal continua, examined whether a supra-segmental feature would be linearly imitated when it is the primary cue (F0 range) and the non-primary cue (duration) to the tonal contrast, respectively. Results showed that F0 range imitation was non-linear while duration imitation was linear. This reveals that the phonological effect is stronger in mediating imitation than would be predicted by the general hypothesis that supra-segmental features are easier to imitate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although at the lexical level (in the citation form of words) Spanish has only high glides, mid vowels may also become nonsyllabic by a postlexical process of syllable contraction. In this paper we report on an experiment designed to study the contraction of sequences of nonhigh vowels in Castilian Spanish. Traditional phonological descriptions of this Spanish dialect state that in sequences of equal height such as /eo/, /oe/, the first of the two vowels undergoes greater shortening, becoming nonsyllabic. In sequences of different height, such as /ae/, /ea/, on the other hand, the higher of the two vowels becomes nonsyllabic. Our results offer only partial support for these hypotheses. In agreement with other recent studies, we find the realization of these sequences to be very variable. In particular, we discuss two seemingly opposite tendencies present in our data and elsewhere for the elimination of mid glides. One is their deletion: /ea/ ▪ [▪a] ▪ [a]. The other one is their raising to high glides: /ea/ ▪ [▪a] ▪ [ja]. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article expands the study of other-initiated repair in conversation—when one party signals a problem with producing or perceiving another's turn at talk—into the domain of visual bodily behavior. It presents one primary cross-linguistic finding about the timing of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: if the party who initiates repair accompanies their turn with a “hold”—when relatively dynamic movements are temporarily and meaningfully held static—this position will not be disengaged until the problem is resolved and the sequence closed. We base this finding on qualitative and quantitative analysis of corpora of conversational interaction from three unrelated languages representing two different modalities: Northern Italian, the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador, and Argentine Sign Language. The cross-linguistic similarities uncovered by this comparison suggest that visual bodily practices have been semiotized for similar interactive functions across different languages and modalities due to common pressures in face-to-face interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]