Experimental approaches to the production and perception of prosody.

Abstract

This Special Issue brings together a selection of papers orally presented at the conference Phonetics and Phonology in Iberia (PaPI), held in Lisbon in 2013 (labfon.letras.ulisboa.pt/papi2013). For 10 years the PaPI conferences have been a highly productive setting for the sharing and discussion of investigation within phonology and phonetics and their interactions, and have undoubtedly played their part in the development of experimental work in the field of prosody (see in particular Frota, Vigario, & Freitas, 2005; Prieto, Mascaro, & Sole, 2007; Romero & Riera, in press; Vigario, Frota, & Freitas, 2009).Prosodic research has witnessed remarkable progress in the last few decades. The limits of the field are pushed farther constantly as new investigations appear, powered by more elaborate experimental methods, new technology and resources, innovative bridges promoting knowledge transfer across disciplines, increasingly sophisticated theoretical models and a continuously evolving set of questions.This volume also reflects the productivity of experimental approaches to prosody. It compiles work addressing a range of questions that are of current interest in prosody, exploring topics such as the phonetic exponents of rhythm and information structure in language development, languageparticular factors in the perception of word stress, social and situational factors underlying speakers' pitch accent selection and the phonology of fine grain phonetic variation in accent realization. All of the papers follow a laboratory-based approach to phonology and a variety of experimental methods are employed to elicit controlled production data as well as to investigate perception, including tasks involving picture-matching and other types of interactive games, discourse completion, ABX discrimination, sequence recall and context matching acceptability judgements.Two papers investigate prosodic development, one contrasting child and adult Dutch monolinguals and the other comparing English and Spanish monolingual and simultaneous English- Spanish bilingual children.In the paper 'Quiet is the New Loud: Pausing and Focus in Child and Adult Dutch', Romoren and Chen report on an experiment that tested the use of pauses to signal focused material in Dutch, both in adults and in 4 to 5 year-olds. Adults tend to use accent and post-focal deaccentuation to mark focus. However, previous research has shown that adult speakers of Dutch also use pauses before focus and that children at this age do not fully master adult focus prosody (Chen, 2007, 2011). The experiment elicited sentences with focus structure by means of a picture-matching game and combining controlled speech contexts with wh-questions. Results showed a significant difference in pause durations before focal and non-focal targets, the pause being longer in the former, both in adults and in children's productions. Nevertheless, the use of pauses was found to be more systematic in children. The authors interpret this difference as a consequence of the child's stage in language development. Research on the development of information structure signalling, using controlled and efficient elicitation methods, is fairly rare, and to our knowledge this is the first investigation on pausing as a means to cue focus in child speech.In the paper by Schmidt and Post ('The Development of Prosodic Features and their Contribution to Rhythm Production in Simultaneous Bilinguals'), the impact of bilingualism in terms of facilitory and inhibitory effects are investigated in relation to the acquisition of prosodic features. Focusing on phrase-final lengthening and accentuation in English and Spanish, two areas where the rhythmic differences between the two languages manifest, the authors demonstrate that the two languages can be rhythmically separated at 4 years, and clearly separable by 6 years of age, and that bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals in the prosodic acquisition of the structurally more complex language (English). …