Previous studies on a variety of languages have demonstrated that manual gesture is temporally aligned with prosodic prominence. However, the majority of these studies have been conducted on languages with word-level stress. In this paper, we investigate the alignment of manual beat gestures to speech in local varieties of Standard Indonesian, a language whose word prosodic system has been the subject of conflicting claims. We focus on the varieties of Indonesian spoken in the eastern part of the archipelago and Java. Our findings reveal that there is a strong tendency to align gesture to penultimate syllables in the eastern variety and a tendency to align gesture to final syllables in the Javanese variety. Additionally, while the eastern patterns appear to be word based, the Javanese pattern shows evidence of being phrase based. Surprisingly, the penultimate syllable emerges as a gestural anchor in the eastern variety even for two of the three speakers who showed little to no regular prosodic prominence on this syllable. This suggests that gestural alignment may serve to uncover prosodic anchors even when they are not employed by the phonology proper.

We investigate the synchronization of speech and co-speech actions (i.e., manual game moves) in a dyadic game interaction across different levels of information structure and mutual visibility. We analyze cross-modal synchronization as the temporal distance between co-speech actions and corresponding (1) pitch accent peaks and (2) word onsets. For (1), we find no effect of mutual visibility on cross-modal synchronization. However, pitch accent peaks and co-speech actions are more tightly aligned when game moves are prosodically prominent due to information structural needs. This result is in line with a view of a tightly coupled processing of modalities, where prominence-lending modifications in the prosodic structure attract corresponding manual actions to be realized in a way similar to ‘beat’ gestures. For (2), we do find an effect of mutual visibility, under which co-speech actions are produced earlier and more tightly aligned with word onsets. This result is in line with a view in which co-speech actions act as communicative affordances, which may help an early disambiguation of a message, similar to ‘representational’ co-speech gestures.

Utterance-final weakening refers to a prosodic feature found at the right periphery of some clauses in Pite Saami. This paper provides the most thorough general description of this prosodic phenomenon to date. The dataset used comes from an annotated corpus of spontaneous speech collected during the last 60 years. The phonetic-acoustic correlates are a complete devoicing of all segments in the final syllables of the affected clause, although creaky or breathy voice may also be present. Typically only one syllable is affected, but sometimes multiple syllables are affected. No syntactic units appear to correlate with this, and the weakening phase can even cross word boundaries. The phenomenon marginally correlates with gender, dialect, and age, with the speech of older speakers tending to feature it more frequently and with a longer prosodic scope. Similar utterance-final weakening phenomena are likely found in other languages, especially those in surrounding areas.

Prosody not only signals the speaker’s cognitive states but can also imitate various concepts. However, previous studies on the latter, the iconic function of prosody, have mostly analyzed novel words and nonlinguistic vocalizations. To fill this gap in the literature, the current study has examined the iconic potential of the prosodic features of existing Japanese imitative words known as ideophones. In Experiment 1, female Japanese speakers pronounced 20 sentences containing ideophones in infant-directed speech. They used a higher f0 to express faster and more pleasant movements. Similar iconic associations were observed in Experiment 2, in which Japanese speakers chose the best-matching pitch–intensity–duration combination for each of the ideophones. In Experiment 3, Japanese speakers chose the best-matching voice quality – creaky voice, falsetto, harsh voice or whisper – for the ideophones. Falsetto was preferred for a light object’s fast motion, harsh voice for violent motion and whisper for quiet motion. Based on these results, we entertain the possibility that the iconic prosody of ideophones provides a missing link in the evolutionary theory of language that began with iconic vocalizations. Ideophones with varying degrees of iconic prosody can be considered to be located between nonlinguistic vocalizations and arbitrary words in this evolutionary path.

In this study, we present data from two experiments investigating the effect of prosodic focus marking on German L1 and L2 speakers’ interpretation of pronouns. Experiment 1 tested L2 speakers’ interpretation of personal and demonstrative subject pronouns. Experiment 2 examined L1 and L2 speakers’ interpretation of unaccented and accented personal subject and object pronouns. The results of experiment 1 reveal that L2 speakers are sensitive to the different functions of the two subject pronouns. However, grammatical role and focus marking influenced referential choice to similar degrees for both pronouns, suggesting that L2 speakers’ weighting of these linguistic factors differs from that of L1 speakers. Experiment 2 showed L1 and L2 speakers to prefer the subject referent for both subject and object pronouns. Referent preference reversal is only observed with the accented subject pronoun in L1 speakers. Ultimately, this study emphasizes the varying levels of sensitivity to grammatical role and information structure observed not only for the different pronoun types but also among different speaker groups.

This article contributes to research on pragmatic borrowings through its exploration of their prosodic features in interactional turns. The pragmatic borrowings focused on are actual or enacted responses that demonstrate a stance towards the interlocutor’s previous turn. The data are drawn from podcast conversations in Finland Swedish. The qualitative exploration of the data, which draws on principles from Interactional Linguistics and uses sequential and acoustic analyses, focuses on an in-depth analysis of four examples of response tokens. Our analysis illustrates that borrowed response tokens are not used frequently, but when they are used, they are marked by speakers prosodically, rendering them stylistically salient within the context of the interaction. The borrowed response tokens demonstrate specific interactional meanings, such as affect, humor, farce and upgrading. These findings demonstrate that, like other pragmatic borrowings, responses are integrated into the overall repertoire of the receiving speech community, serving as stylistic variants alongside heritage forms.

This study investigates heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish in the U.S. and potential areas of divergence in speech from homeland speakers. To examine the relative contribution of prosody and segments in perceived heritage accent, we conducted an accent rating task with speech samples of second language learners (L2s), HSs and homeland speakers presented in three conditions: original, prosody-only and segments-only. The stimuli were rated by two groups: HSs and homeland speakers. The results revealed that HSs and homeland speakers had similar global accent perceptions, rating HSs as more native-like than L2s but less native-like than homeland speakers. We found that both rater groups aligned with a dominant language ideology of Spanish; speakers who were judged as more native-like were perceived as residing in a Spanish-speaking country. Our findings also demonstrate that prosody contributes more to perceived heritage accent than segments, while segments contribute more to L2 foreign accent than prosody.

Accounts of prosody in understudied languages are often impressionistic, potentially leading to conflicting accounts due to different researchers being drawn to different acoustic cues. The debate surrounding the location of primary stress in Plains Cree is such a case. One widely adopted claim states that stress is realized on the antepenult, whereas others argue for a penultimate accent. The present study investigates the phonetic properties of stress (duration, F0, intensity, vowel quality) in multisyllabic words and in phrases to understand the patterns that have led to the current debate. We find that there are cues supporting both previous claims: a high F0 on the antepenultimate syllable compatible with “antepenultimate stress” and a falling F0 on the penultimate syllable compatible with “penultimate accent.” Based on the acoustic evidence, we suggest that Plains Cree is a pitch-accent system, with a predictable penultimate HL word-level pitch-accent. Tonal patterns in other syllables are the result of prosodic boundaries, phonetic interpolation, or tonal spreading.

This study investigates phonological and phonetic details of disjunctive declaratives (ddcls) and alternative questions (altqs) in Arabic. The aim of the phonological and phonetic analyses of these syntactically identical utterances is to find out the cues that are responsible for the disambiguation. Consequently, a production study eliciting ddcls and altqs was run with 20 participants producing 160 utterances (80 ddcls and 80 altqs). Findings reveal that ddcls and altqs are similar in having a global rise-fall contour, but differ in the phonetic implementation of the fall, since minimum F0 values are significantly higher in altqs than in ddcls, suggesting that there is a fall to mid in the former (proposing !H%) and a fall to low in the latter (L%). There are also significant phonological differences in the accentual features between both sentence types, i.e., the conjuncts are always accented in altqs, but they are deaccented in ddcls. The findings are a contribution to the prosody-meaning literature, showing the importance of prosody for syntactic disambiguation. The findings are used to propose a theory for the disambiguation of disjunctive sentences.

It has been shown in the literature that the preference or requirement for immediately preverbal focus placement, found in a number of languages (especially verb-/head-final ones), can result from different syntactic configurations. In some languages (e.g., in Hungarian), immediately preverbal foci are raised to a dedicated projection, accompanied by verb movement). In others (e.g., in Turkish), preverbal foci remain in situ, with any material intervening between the focus and the verb undergoing displacement), to allow for the focus–verb adjacency. We offer a unified account of the two types of preverbal foci, raised and in situ ones, based on their prosodic requirements. Specifically, we show that both types of foci require alignment with an edge of a prosodic constituent but differ in the directionality of alignment (right or left). Our analysis rests on bringing together two independent existing proposals, Focus-as-Alignment and flexible Intonational Phrase (ɩ)-mapping. We show that this approach makes correct predictions for a number of unrelated Eurasian languages and discuss some further implications of this approach.