Examines two empirical issues regarding conversational exchange: what it is about talk that helps next speakers recognize that current speakers have finished and why overlap occurs if precise mechanisms exist to help speakers project turn completion. Distinguishes between contributions from dialog partners that are turn-competitive versus those…

Investigates syntactic and prosodic features of speakers' speech at points where turn-taking and backchannels occur, focusing on an analysis of Japanese spontaneous dialogs. The study shows that in both turn-taking and backchannels, some instances of syntactic features make extremely strong contributions, and syntax has a stronger contribution…

Approaches prosody as one set of resources and practices among many by which participants interactively produce conversation and other talk-in interaction, examining three episodes of conversation that exemplify different orders of organization in which prosodic practices may be implicated. Reflects on what is needed for students of conversation…

Investigated the functions of dynamic speech rates as contextualization cues in conversational Japanese, examining five spontaneous task-oriented dialogs and analyzing the potential of speech-rate changes in signaling the structure of the information being exchanged. Results found a correlation between speech decelerations and the openings of new…

This article examines the constraints on Prosodic Word production in Spanish by three monolingual and three Spanish-German bilingual children from the beginning of word production until 2;2. It also considers the relationship between Prosodic Words and Phonological Phrases, and in the case of monosyllabic words, it takes into consideration…

Recent research indicates that the statistical properties of the input have an impact on the prosodic shape of young children's word production. However, it is still not clear whether the effects of input statistics emerge from the frequency of prosodic structures or the frequency of individual lexical items. This issue is investigated in this…

The present study addresses the question of how within-word prosodic constituent boundaries constrain V-to-V coarticulation in Japanese. The smallest prosodic unit that might affect V-to-V coarticulation is the bimoraic foot. The effect of the foot boundary is observed in the present study: the bimoraic foot constrains the extent of V-to-V…

Investigated whether current approaches to automatically classifying dialog acts (DAs) in natural conversation could be improved by adding prosodic information. Using conversations from the switchboard corpus, researchers annotated DAs, automatically extracting prosodic features for each DA. Results indicated that DAs are redundantly marked in…

This paper focuses on the development of Prosodic Word shapes in Catalan, a language which differs from both Spanish and English in the distribution of PW structures. Of particular interest are the truncations of initial unstressed syllables, and how these develop over time. Developmental qualitative and quantitative data from seven…

Language learning requires a capacity to recall novel series of speech sounds. Research shows that prosodic marks create grouping effects enhancing serial recall. However, any restriction on memory affecting the reproduction of prosody would limit the set of patterns that could be learned and subsequently used in speech. By implication, grouping…

The article describes the contrastive possibilities of alignment of high accents in three Romance varieties, namely, Central Catalan, Neapolitan Italian, and Pisa Italian. The Romance languages analyzed in this article provide crucial evidence that small differences in alignment in rising accents should be encoded phonologically. To account for…

Introduces a special issue that includes papers which focus on the relationship between prosody and conversation. The papers represent different research traditions (e.g., the ethnomethodological framework of dialog analyses and report case studies, quantitative study of large corpora, experimental research using elicited or constructed speech…

Examined recorded business telephone conversations, noting that at least some forms of spontaneous conversation contained a second form of global intonational marking. Certain attributes of intonation persisted throughout discourse units in the calls, differentiating one unit from another. Two types of parameters emerged (one controlling midpoint…

Explored the processing of ambiguous sentences that may be assigned a gapping or nongapping structure. Focuses on what factors affect the ultimate interpretive preferences for these sentences. In a questionnaire, sentences with greater parallelism between arguments received more gapping responses, though an overall bias toward the nongapping…

In two eye-tracking experiments the role of contrastive pitch accents during the on-line determination of referents was examined. In both experiments, German listeners looked earlier at the picture of a referent belonging to a contrast pair ("red scissors," given "purple scissors") when instructions to click on it carried a…