This paper presents a controlled pretest-training-posttest study on using a small membraphone instrument called "kazoo" for L2 pronunciation practice and reducing foreign accentedness. Learners were recorded for free speech before and after a six-week pronunciation and oral skills course including L2 prosody training with personal…

In her influential paper on stance, alignment, and affiliation in conversational storytelling, Tanya Stivers argued that two basic conversational means of receiving a story, nods and vocal continuers, differ in their function: whereas vocal continuers display "alignment" with the telling activity, nods, during the mid-telling, convey…

In this paper, experiments on the automatic discrimination of basic emotions from spoken Finnish are described. For the purpose of the study, a large emotional speech corpus of Finnish was collected; 14 professional actors acted as speakers, and simulated four primary emotions when reading out a semantically neutral text. More than 40 prosodic…

Topics covered in papers presented at a Finnish workshop on discourse analysis include, in English: the situational code in conversation; persuasive strategies and face-work in impromptu speech; historical aspects of complex behavioral strategies in politeness; the implications of predictability and unpredictability for negotiation discourse; and…