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This study aims to test quantitatively whether lled pauses (FPs) may highlight discourse structure. More specically, it is rst investigated whether FPs are more typical in the vicinity of major discourse boundaries. Secondly, the FPs are analyzed acoustically, to check whether those occurring at major discourse boundaries are segmentally and prosodically dierent from those at shallower breaks. Analyses of twelve spontaneous monologues (Dutch) show that phrases following major discourse boundaries more often contain FPs. Additionally, FPs after stronger breaks tend to occur phraseinitially, whereas the majority of the FPs after weak boundaries are in phrase-internal position. Also, acoustic observations reveal that FPs at major discourse boundaries are both segmentally and prosodically distinct. They also dier with respect to the distribution of neighbouring silent pauses.

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Abstract:The tearing effect refers to the relevance of tears as an important visual cue adding meaning to human facial expression. However, little is known about how people process these visual cues and their mediating role in terms of emotion perception and person judgment. We therefore conducted two experiments in which we measured the influence of tears on the identification of sadness and the perceived need for social support at an early perceptional level. In two experiments (1 and 2), participants were exposed to sad and neutral faces. In both experiments, the face stimuli were presented for 50 milliseconds. In experiment 1, tears were digitally added to sad faces in one condition. Participants demonstrated a significant faster recognition of sad faces with tears compared to those without tears. In experiment 2, tears were added to neutral faces as well. Participants had to indicate to what extent the displayed individuals were in need of social support. Study participants reported a greater perceived need for social support to both sad and neutral faces with tears than to those without tears. This study thus demonstrated that emotional tears serve as important visual cues at an early (pre-attentive) level.

This paper presents the design and the evaluation of a method to study prosodic features of discourse structure in unrestricted spontaneous speech. Past work has indicated that one of the major difficulties that discourse prosody analysts have to overcome is finding an independent specification of hierarchical discourse structure as to avoid circularity. Previous studies have tried to solve this problem by constraining the discourse or by basing segmentations on a specific discourse theory. The current investigation first explores the possibility of experimentally determining discourse boundaries in unrestricted speech. In a next stage, it is investigated to what extent boundaries obtained in this way correlate with specific prosodic variables: the features pause, pitch range, and type of boundary tone are studied as a function of discourse structure.

This article reports on a comparative analysis of accentuation strategies within Italian and Dutch noun phrases (NPs). Its goal is not only to gain insight into what speakers do, but also into how listeners' perception and interpretation of incoming speech in different languages is affected by the distribution of accents. To this end, use is made of a particular experimental paradigm, which makes it possible to compare accent patterns in different languages from an acoustic, perceptual and functional point of view. Accent patterns were obtained via a simple dialogue game played by eight Dutch speakers and eight Italian ones. In this way, target descriptions of all speakers were obtained in the following four contexts: all new, single contrast in the adjective, single contrast in the noun, and double contrast. The accent patterns in these Dutch and Italian utterances were then compared in three different studies. Study 1 looks at accent distribution and finds that, in Dutch, new and contrastive information are accented, while given information is not; in Italian, distribution is not a significant factor in distinguishing information status, since within the elicited NPs both adjective and noun are always accented, irrespective of the status of the discourse context. Study 2 consists of prominence tests to investigate whether the accents differ in the degree of perceived emphasis. In Dutch, information status is reflected in these prominence differences: single contrastive accents are perceived to be the most emphatic, and given words the least emphatic. In Italian, it is less clear how gradient differences between accents can be linked to aspects of the discourse context. Study 3 presents a functional analysis of accent patterns exploring whether listeners are able to reconstruct a preceding utterance on the basis of prosodic properties of the current utterance.

This paper describes two experiments on the role of audiovisual prosody for signalling and detecting meta-cognitive information in question answering. The Wrst study consists of an experiment, in which participants are asked factual questions in a conversational setting, while they are being Wlmed. Statistical analyses bring to light that the speakers' Feeling of Knowing (FOK) is cued by a number of visual and verbal properties. It appears that answers tend to have a higher number of marked auditory and visual cues, including divergences from the neutral facial expression, when the FOK score is low, while the reverse is true for non-answers. The second study is a perception experiment, in which a selection of the utterances from the Wrst study is presented to participants in one of three conditions: vision only, sound only, or vision + sound. Results reveal that human observers can reliably distinguish high FOK responses from low FOK responses in all three conditions, but that answers are easier than non-answers, and that a bimodal presentation of the stimuli is easier than the unimodal counterparts. 

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