Located at the intersection of phonology, psycholinguistics and phonetics, this volume offers the latest research findings in key areas of prosodic theory, including: •The relationship between intonation and pragmatics in speech production •Sentence modality prosody characterization •The role of pitch in quantity-based sound systems •Consonant-conditioned tone depression phonology across languages •The encoding of intonational contrasts in both intonational and tonal languages Featuring new data and ground-breaking results, the papers draw on empirical approaches that analyze production, perception and comprehension experiments such as the prepared speech paradigm and semantic scaling tasks. These are discussed in a variety of languages, some underrepresented in the literature (such as French and Estonian) while others, such as Shekgalagari, are examined in this way for the first time. This collection of cutting-edge material will be of interest to a broad range of language researchers.

Phonetics - the study and classification of speech sounds - is a major sub-discipline of linguistics. Bringing together a team of internationally renowned phoneticians, this handbook provides comprehensive coverage of the most recent, cutting-edge work in the field, and focuses on the most widely-debated contemporary issues. Chapters are divided into five thematic areas: segmental production, prosodic production, measuring speech, audition and perception, and applications of phonetics. Each chapter presents an historical overview of the area, along with critical issues, current research and advice on the best practice for teaching phonetics to undergraduates. It brings together global perspectives, and includes examples from a wide range of languages, allowing readers to extend their knowledge beyond English. By providing both state-of-the-art research information, and an appreciation of how it can be shared with students, this handbook is essential both for academic phoneticians, and anyone with an interest in this exciting, rapidly developing field.

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.

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 rev

A vital resource on speech and language processing in bilingual adults and children The Listening Bilingual brings together in one volume the various components of spoken language processing in bilingual adults, infants and children. The book includes a review of speech perception and word recognition; syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of speech processing; the perception and comprehension of bilingual mixed speech (code-switches, borrowings and interferences); and the assessment of bilingual speech perception and comprehension in adults and children in the clinical context. The two main authors as well as selected guest authors, Mark Antoniou, Theres Grüter, Robert J. Hartsuiker, Elizabeth D. Peña and Lisa M. Bedore, and Lu-Feng Shi, introduce the various approaches used in the study of spoken language perception and comprehension in bilingual individuals. The authors focus on experimentation that involves both well-established tasks and newer tasks, as well as techniques used in brain imaging. This important resource: Is the first of its kind to concentrate specifically on spoken language processing in bilingual adults and children. Offers a unique text that covers both fundamental and applied research in bilinguals. Covers a range of topics including speech perception, spoken word recognition, higher level processing, code-switching, and assessment. Presents information on the assessment of bilingual children’s language development Written for advanced undergraduate students in linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and speech/language pathology as well as researchers, The Listening Bilingual offers a state-of-the-art review of the recent developments and approaches in speech and language processing in bilingual people of all ages.

This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.

In 2016, the Going Romance conference series celebrated its 30th edition and the Goethe University of Frankfurt (Germany) had the honor of organizing this.The edited volume at hand presents a selection of 17 peer-reviewed articles, based on papers that were presented at this occasion. The volume covers a wide variety of phenomena, ranging from morphosyntax to prosody. Some are discussed from a synchronic perspective, others from a diachronic perspective, or in the context of language acquisition. In addition to frequently-studied languages such as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, this volume features lesser-studied varieties including Aromanian, Gallo, and Sardinian.

This volume brings together two under-investigated areas of intonation typology. While tone languages make up to 70 percent of the world’s languages, only few have been explored for intonation. And even though one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, and most sub-Saharan languages are tone languages, recent collections on tone and intonation typology have almost entirely ignored African languages. This book aims to fill this gap.

This book provides thorough descriptive and theory-neutral coverage of the full range of phonological phenomena of Chichewa, a Malawian Bantu language. Bantu languages have played and continue to play an important role as a source of data illustrating core phonological processes such as vowel harmony, nasal place assimilation, postnasal laryngeal alternations, tonal phenomena such as High tone spread and the OCP, prosodic morphology, and the phonology-syntax interface. Chichewa, in particular, has been a key language in the development of theoretical approaches to these phenomena. In this volume, Laura Downing and Al Mtenje examine not only these well-known features of Chichewa but also less well-studied phonological topics such as positional asymmetries in the distribution of segments, the phonetics of tone, and intonation. They survey important recent theoretical approaches to phonological problems such as focus prosody, reduplication, and vowel harmony, where Chichewa data is routinely referred to in the literature. The book will serve as a resource for all phonologists interested in these processes, regardless of their theoretical background, as well as Bantu scholars and linguists working on interface issues.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2021, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in September 2021.* The 74 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 163 submissions. The papers present current research in the area of computer speech processing including audio signal processing, automatic speech recognition, speaker recognition, computational paralinguistics, speech synthesis, sign language and multimodal processing, and speech and language resources. *Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, SPECOM 2021 was held as a hybrid event.