This book provides an in-depth, multi-dimensional analysis of conversations between autistic adults. The investigation is focussed on intonation style, turn-taking and the use of backchannels, filled pauses and silent pauses.

Previous findings on intonation style in the context of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are contradictory, with claims ranging from characteristically monotonous to characteristically melodic intonation. A novel methodology for quantifying intonation style is used, and it is revealed that autistic speakers tended towards a more melodic intonation style compared to control speakers in the data set under investigation.

Research on turn-taking (the organisation of who speaks when in conversation) in ASD is limited, with most studies claiming a tendency for longer silent gaps in ASD. No clear overall difference in turn-timing between the ASD and the control group was found in the data under study. There was, however, a clear difference between groups specifically in the earliest stages of dialogue, where ASD dyads produced considerably longer silent gaps than controls.

Backchannels (listener signals such as mmhm or okay) have barely been investigated in ASD to date. The current analysis shows that autistic speakers produced fewer backchannels per minute (particularly in the early stages of dialogue), and that backchannels were less diverse prosodically and lexically. Filled pauses (hesitation signals such as uhm and uh) in ASD have been the subject of a handful of previous studies, most of which claim that autistic speakers produced fewer uhm tokens (specifically). It is shown that filled pauses were produced at an identical rate in both groups and that there was an equivalent preference of uhm over uh. ASD speakers differed only in the prosodic realisation of filled pauses. It is further shown that autistic speakers produced more long silent (within-speaker) pauses than controls.

The analyses presented in this book provide new insights into conversation strategies and intonation styles in ASD, as reviewed in a summary analysis. The findings are discussed in the context of previous research, general characteristics of cognition in ASD, and the importance of studying communication in interaction and across neurotypes.

Synopsis: In spoken language comprehension, the hearer is faced with a more or less continuous stream of auditory information. Prosodic cues, such as pitch movement, pre-boundary lengthening, and pauses, incrementally help to organize the incoming stream of information into prosodic phrases, which often coincide with syntactic units. Prosody is hence central to spoken language comprehension and some models assume that the speaker produces prosody in a consistent and hierarchical fashion. While there is manifold empirical evidence that prosodic boundary cues are reliably and robustly produced and effectively guide spoken sentence comprehension across different populations and languages, the underlying mechanisms and the nature of the prosody-syntax interface still have not been identified sufficiently. This is also reflected in the fact that most models on sentence processing completely lack prosodic information.

This edited book volume is grounded in a workshop that was held in 2021 at the annual conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS). The five chapters cover selected topics on the production and comprehension of prosodic cues in various populations and languages, all focusing in particular on processing of prosody at structurally relevant prosodic boundaries. Specifically, the book comprises cross-linguistic evidence as well as evidence from non-native listeners, infants, adults, and elderly speakers, highlighting the important role of prosody in both language production and comprehension.

Synopsis: Sonority is a central notion in phonetics and phonology and it is essential for generalizations related to syllabic organization. However, to date there is no clear consensus on the phonetic basis of sonority, neither in perception nor in production. The widely used Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) represents the speech signal as a sequence of discrete units, where phonological processes are modeled as symbol manipulating rules that lack a temporal dimension and are devoid of inherent links to perceptual, motoric or cognitive processes. The current work aims to change this by outlining a novel approach for the extraction of continuous entities from acoustic space in order to model dynamic aspects of phonological perception. It is used here to advance a functional understanding of sonority as a universal aspect of prosody that requires pitch-bearing syllables as the building blocks of speech.

This book argues that sonority is best understood as a measurement of pitch intelligibility in perception, which is closely linked to periodic energy in acoustics. It presents a novel principle for sonority-based determinations of well-formedness – the Nucleus Attraction Principle (NAP). Two complementary NAP models independently account for symbolic and continuous representations and they mostly outperform SSP-based models, demonstrated here with experimental perception studies and with a corpus study of Modern Hebrew nouns.

This work also includes a description of ProPer (Prosodic Analysis with Periodic Energy). The ProPer toolbox further exploits the proposal that periodic energy reflects sonority in order to cover major topics in prosodic research, such as prominence, intonation and speech rate. The book is finally concluded with brief discussions on selected topics: (i) the phonotactic division of labor with respect to /s/-stop clusters; (ii) the debate about the universality of sonority; and (iii) the fate of the classic phonetics–phonology dichotomy as it relates to continuity and dynamics in phonology.

Synopsis: The complexities of speech production, perception, and comprehension are enormous. Theoretical approaches of these complexities most recently face the challenge of accounting for findings on subphonemic differences. The aim of the present dissertation is to establish a robust foundation of findings on such subphonemic differences.

One rather popular case for differences in subphonemic detail is word-final /s/ and /z/ in English (henceforth S) as it constitutes a number of morphological functions. Using word-final S, three general issues are investigated. First, are there subphonemic durational differences between different types of word-final S? If there are such differences, how can they be accounted for? Second, can such subphonemic durational differences be perceived? Third, do such subphonemic durational differences influence the comprehension of S?

These questions are investigated by five highly controlled studies: a production task, an implementation of Linear Discriminative Learning, a same-different task, and two number-decision tasks. Using not only real words but also pseudowords as target items, potentially confounding effects of lexical storage are controlled for.

Concerning the first issue, the results show that there are indeed durational differences between different types of word-final S. Non-morphemic S is longest in duration, clitic S is shortest in duration, and plural S duration is in-between non-morphemic S and clitic S durations. It appears that the durational differences are connected to a word’s semantic activation diversity and its phonological certainty. Regarding the second issue, subphonemic durational differences in word-final S can be perceived, with higher levels of perceptibility for differences of 35 ms and higher. In regard to the third issue, subphonemic durational differences are found not to influence the speed of comprehension, but show a significant effect on the process of comprehension. The overall results give raise to a revision of various extant models of speech production, perception, and comprehension.

Prosody has been characterised as a "half-tamed savage" being shaped by both discrete, categorical aspects as well as gradient, continuous phenomena. This book is concerned with the relation of the "wild" and the "tamed" sides of prosodic prominence. It reviews problems that arise from a strict separation of categorical and continuous representations in models of phonetics and phonology, and it explores the potential role of descriptions aimed at reconciling the two domains. In doing so, the book offers an introduction to dynamical systems, a framework that has been studied extensively in the last decades to model speech production and perception. The reported acoustic and articulatory data presented in this book show that categorical and continuous modulations used to enhance prosodic prominence are deeply intertwined and even exhibit a kind of symbiosis. A multi-dimensional dynamical model of prosodic prominence is sketched, based on the empirical data, combining tonal and articulatory aspects of prosodic focus marking. The model demonstrates how categorical and continuous aspects can be inte- grated in a joint theoretical treatment that overcomes a strict separation of phonetics and phonology.

The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language whose strongest cross-linguistic patterns are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure. Syllable patterns involving long sequences of consonants are both typologically rare and theoretically marginalized, with few approaches treating these as natural or unproblematic structures. This book is an investigation of the properties of languages with highly complex syllable patterns. The two aims are (i) to establish whether these languages share other linguistic features in common such that they constitute a distinct linguistic type, and (ii) to identify possible diachronic paths and natural mechanisms by which these patterns come about in the history of a language. These issues are investigated in a diversified sample of 100 languages, 25 of which have highly complex syllable patterns.

In English, phonological double consonants only occur across morphological boundaries, for example, in affixation (e.g. in unnatural, innumerous). There are two possibilities for the phonetic realization of these morphological geminates: Either the phonological double is realized with a longer duration than a phonological singleton (gemination), or it is of the same duration as a singleton consonant (degemination).

The present book provides the first large-scale empirical study on the gemination with the five English affixes un-, locative in-, negative in-, dis- and -ly. Using corpus and experimental data, the predictions of various approaches to the morpho-phonological and the morpho-phonetic interface are tested. By finding out which approach can account best for the gemination pattern of English affixed words, important implications about the interplay between morphology, phonology and phonetics are drawn.

This book presents a new approach to studying the syntax of human language, one which emphasizes how we think about time. Tilsen argues that many current theories are unsatisfactory because those theories conceptualize syntactic patterns with spatially arranged structures of objects. These object-structures are atemporal and do not lend well to reasoning about time. The book develops an alternative conceptual model in which oscillatory systems of various types interact with each other through coupling forces, and in which the relative energies of those systems are organized in particular ways. Tilsen emphasizes that the two primary mechanisms of the approach – oscillators and energy levels – require alternative ways of thinking about time. Furthermore, his theory leads to a new way of thinking about grammaticality and the recursive nature of language. The theory is applied to a variety of syntactic phenomena: word order, phrase structure, morphosyntax, constituency, case systems, ellipsis, anaphora, and islands. The book also presents a general program for the study of language in which the construction of linguistic theories is itself an object of theoretical analysis.

This book presents a collection of pioneering papers reflecting current methods in prosody research with a focus on Romance languages. The rapid expansion of the field of prosody research in the last decades has given rise to a proliferation of methods that has left little room for the critical assessment of these methods. The aim of this volume is to bridge this gap by embracing original contributions, in which experts in the field assess, reflect, and discuss different methods of data gathering and analysis. The book might thus be of interest to scholars and established researchers as well as to students and young academics who wish to explore the topic of prosody, an expanding and promising area of study.

Many researchers assume that the relation between morphology and phonology is not a direct one but is modulated by prosodic constituents, particularly the phonological word. Despite the theoretical relevance of the phonological word in morphophonology, phonetic investigations of the realization of (complex) words are still rare. The book aims to shed some light on this issue. On the basis of about 3800 tokens from experimentally elicited and spontaneous speech, it investigates the prosodic boundary phenomena glottal stop insertion / glottalization and degemination, as well as durational reductions and /t/-deletions in the vicinity of a morphological and/or prosodic boundary. Informed by findings from usage-based accounts of language, it systematically introduces token frequency and other potentially influencing factors into the analysis. The results yield a rather complex picture that, on the whole, corroborates the relevance of the phonological word as an interface domain between morphology and phonology. At the same time, the results underline the necessity to consider usage-based factors such as frequency, thus all in all lending support to so-called hybrid models of language.

In most languages, words contain vowels, elements of high intensity with rich harmonic structure, enabling the perceptual retrieval of pitch. By contrast, in Tashlhiyt, a Berber language, words can be composed entirely of voiceless segments. When an utterance consists of such words, the phonetic opportunity for the execution of intonational pitch movements is exceptionally limited. This book explores in a series of production and perception experiments how these typologically rare phonotactic patterns interact with intonational aspects of linguistic structure. It turns out that Tashlhiyt allows for a tremendously flexible placement of tonal events. Observed intonational structures can be conceived of as different solutions to a functional dilemma: The requirement to realise meaningful pitch movements in certain positions and the extent to which segments lend themselves to a clear manifestation of these pitch movements.

Die Artikulatorische Phonologie (Catherine Browman und Louis Goldstein) wurde als Alternative zu segmentalen Ansätzen entwickelt. So nimmt die segmentale Phonologie an, dass nur distinkte Information gespeichert wird, die dann mit Hilfe von Regeln und Rechenprinzipien von der kategorialen Welt der Symbole in die kontinuierliche Welt der physikalischen Repräsentation übersetzt wird. Die Artikulatorische Phonologie hingegen nimmt an, dass auch kontinuierliche Information wie beispielsweise sprecher- oder situationsbedingte Variationen als Teil des Sprachsystems gespeichert werden. Variabilität wird hier als Teil des linguistischen Systems betrachtet, das konkret Aufschluss über zugrundeliegende Strukturen gibt. Im Modell der Artikulatorischen Phonologie wird Sprache als dynamisches System betrachtet und somit phonetische und phonologische Information integriert. Die Grundeinheiten der Artikulatorischen Phonologie sind nicht Segmente oder Merkmale, sondern artikulatorische Gesten. Diese legen linguistische relevante Konstriktionen wie beispielsweise einen Vollverschluss der Zungenspitze an den Alveolen sowie eine glottale Öffnungsgeste für Stimmlosigkeit bei der Produktion von /t/. Die Einbeziehung der zeitlichen Domäne ermöglicht im Gegensatz zu segmentalen Ansätzen die Abbildung natürlicher Variabilität. So kann beispielsweise im Falle von /t/ der Grad der Aspiration direkt aus der zeitlichen Anordnung der glottalen und oralen Geste abgeleitet werden: Ist die glottale Geste länger als die Zungenspitzengeste aktiviert, so entsteht auf akustischer Oberfläche Aspiration. Artikulatorische Gesten enkodieren darüber hinaus den kontextuellen Einfluss (Koartikulation in Form von Synergien zwischen Organgruppen) und können direkt den Einfluss höhere linguistischer Strukturen wie der prosodischen Hierarchie abbilden. Das vorliegende Buch stellt eine Einführung in die Artikulatorische Phonologie dar. Es richtet sich an Leserinnen und Leser, die phonetische Grundkenntnisse besitzen und sich mit der Artikulatorischen Phonologie beschäftigen. Darüber hinaus werden neben einer Einführung in das Model auch neuere Arbeiten und aktuelle Weiterentwicklungen aufgezeigt, insbesondere die Implementierung prosodischer Aspekte in die Artikulatorische Phonologie. Somit eignet sich das Buch auch für Leserinnen und Leser, die bereits mit der Artikulatorischen Phonologie in Kontakt gekommen sind, aber ihr Wissen vertiefen möchten. Zur Veranschaulichung werden Beispiele aus verschiedenen Sprachen gegeben, darunter Deutsch, Katalanisch, Italienisch, Polnisch, Mandarin und Tashlhiyt Berber.

Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked. While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a lemma’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style.

Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar- based approaches to prosody. Trough four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody. About the Author: Francesco Cangemi Francesco Cangemi (1983) studied Literature and Philology in Naples, completing his undergraduate studies with a published MA dissertation on vowel systems in southern Italian dialects. After receiving his PhD in Linguistics from Aix-Marseille University with a thesis on underspecification in prosodic categories, he is currently working as a post-doc researcher in Cologne, focussing on the encoding and decoding of linguistic prominence, and in Zürich, focussing on morphosyntactic agreement in Italian dialects.