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This Report examines the importance of suprasegmentals and how one might teach them. I demonstrate, through the readings of experts in the field, the close relationship between suprasegmental features and intelligibility, which I support with a review of research literature as the goal of instruction. Pronunciation and suprasegmental research in pedagogy is analyzed and discussed, and teacher and learner beliefs are compared with current research-backed conclusions. Finally, this Report provides the readers with sample lessons on nuclear stress to demonstrate how to incorporate a five-step pronunciation framework into a classroom or tutoring setting. / text

This thesis presents a primarily descriptive account of the structural and meaning properties of verb and numeral reduplication in Paraguayan Guaraní, a Tupí-Guaraní language spoken by about four million people mainly in Paraguay. Based on data collected through elicitation sessions with three consultants, I demonstrate that Guaraní exhibits both patterns of total (root) and partial (disyllabic) reduplication. I will also show that this disyllabic pattern of copying is in fact due to the presence of a prosodic constraint of disyllabicity which applies to the entire reduplication system of Guaraní. In terms of their meaning properties, Guaraní reduplicative forms are mostly associated with such iconic notions as iterativity, continuity, multiplicity and distributivity. Despite the semantic regularity of Guaraní reduplicated structures from a crosslinguistic perspective, there are aspects of their form which pose challenges to templatic accounts of reduplication. A brief discussion of some of these issues concludes this work.

This dissertation is a comprehensive description of the structure of the prosody of Singapore English. Using the Prosodic Hierarchy as a framework, each layer of the structure of Singapore English is described in detail. The smallest level described in this dissertation is the syllable, the domain in which the majority of segmental processes occur in Singapore English. The second level is the prosodic word domain, where there is a high tone anchored to the final syllable and a low tone anchored to the left edge, and these tones are shown in this dissertation to be recursive. These tones are independent of stress, which is argued to not exist in Singapore English. The third level is the intonational phrase, where the final syllable carries the boundary tone of the entire intonational phrase, affecting the tones of final particles. There is also a phrase-initial boost on the first prosodic word of the intonational phrase. Markedly absent is any intermediate phrase or domain between the word and intonational phrase, which is argued to not exist in this dissertation. The dissertation ends with a look at the possible origins of the prosody of Singapore English and a consideration of the prosodic systems which may have influenced its development.

The aim of this study is to contribute to the larger body of research concerned with the prosodic systems of the Basque dialects currently spoken in Southern Basque country. More specifically, the author focuses on Standard Basque from the Bilbao area and its potential prosodic system(s). Standard Basque was phonologically codified by the Basque Academy, but there was no prosodic system provided by the Basque Academy. Although initial investigations have been undertaken by Hualde, more current research has shown that the standard spoken outside of the classroom is different from that which is taught (Lantto, 2019; Rodríguez-Ordóñez, 2016). Given that prosody is rarely taught within the classroom, it would not be surprising for differences to be found. The most obvious difference between Standard Basque and some of the traditional dialects is that Standard has no word-level contrastive stress; functions such as singular/plural distinctions and case are marked by postpositions. What has been determined is that the prosodic system of Standard Basque, or Batua, patterns closely to that of Gipuzkoan Basque. However, as noted by Hualde & Elordieta (2014), there is little knowledge regarding the variation of the functioning of Standard Basque’s acoustic correlates. As stated by Elordieta & Hualde (2001), it is only after a comparison of the intonational characteristics of the currently spoken dialects has been conducted that a typological categorization of Basque prosodic systems can be made. As Standard Basque was not codified with a prosodic system, it ultimately comes down to what individual speakers and speaker groups have done to account for this in their standard dialect productions. It cannot be presumed that the prosody of SB (Standard Basque) found in one region will exactly line up with prosody found in other regions; these too would need to be documented and analyzed as prosodic sub-systems. One major gap in current research is the analysis of intonation at the phrasal level; Gaminde et al. (2011) look at acoustic correlates and their respective force, but only at the word level. While Hualde looks at intonation, the study uses Gipuzkoan Basque used as a substratum, which constricts the findings to that particular dialectal region. For this reason, the dialect of Batua spoken in the Bilbao area proves to be worth investigating. The local dialect of the area was long ago lost, such that Batua could be said to be the Bilbao dialect. The revitalization movement of the 1960s brought about a significant number of new speakers, who learned the standard variety in school. To add to this, Bilbao’s presence as a major commercial hub has made it so that there is a vast number of regional vernaculars circulating throughout the area, all in contact with one another. For this study, data was taken from 6 Basque-Spanish bilinguals whose primary dialect of Basque is the standard, that participated in two experimental tasks: eliciting words in isolation in one task and eliciting neutral declaratives and yes-no questions in the other. These tasks were a means of gathering raw data on the intonation of both word and phrasal level productions. Results supports the previous findings of Gaminde et al. (2015) as well as those of Aurrekoetxea et al. (2015), in terms of how stress is realized in Standard Basque when taking into account factors such as syllable weight and syllable count. What’s more, findings also support the proposition of Hualde & Beristain (to appear) that inter-speaker variation will be heavily affected by the contact speakers have with other dialects of Basque.

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Thesis advisor: Lisa F. Barrett / Thesis advisor: Hiram Brownell / Human voice carries precious information about a person. From a brief vocalization to a spoken sentence, listeners rapidly form perceptual judgments of transient affective states such as happiness, as well as perceptual judgments of the more stable social traits such as trustworthiness. In social interactions, sometimes it is not just what we say – but how we say it – that matters. This dissertation sought to better understand how affective properties in voice influence memory and how they subserve social perception. To these ends, I investigated the effect of affective prosody on memory for speech by manipulating both prosody valence and semantic valence, I explored the fundamental dimensions of social perception from voice, and I discussed the relationship of those social dimensions to affective dimensions of voice. In the first chapter, I examined how prosody valence influences memory for speech that varied in semantic valence. Participants listened to narratives spoken in neutral, positive, and negative prosody and recalled as much as they could of the narrative content. Importantly, the arousal level of the affective prosody was controlled across the different prosody valence conditions. Results showed that prosody valence influenced memory for speech content and the effect depended on the relationship between prosody valence and semantic valence. Specifically, congruence between prosody and semantic valence influenced memory. When people were listening to neutral content, affective prosody (either positive or negative) impaired memory. When listening to positive or negative content, incongruent prosody led to better recall. The present research shows that it is not just what you say, but also how you say it that will influence what people remember of your message. In the second chapter, I explored the fundamental dimensions of social perception from voices compared to faces, using a data-driven approach. Participants were encouraged to freely write down anything that came to mind about the voice they heard or the face they saw. Descriptors were classified into categories and the most frequently occurred social trait categories were selected. A separate group of participants rated the voices and faces on the selected social traits. Principal component analyses revealed that female voices were evaluated mostly on three dimensions: attractiveness, trustworthiness, and dominance; whereas male voices were evaluated mostly on two dimensions: social engagement and trustworthiness. For social evaluation of faces, a similar two-dimensional structure of social engagement and trustworthiness was found for both genders. The gender difference in social perception of voice is discussed with respect to gender stereotypes and the role voice pitch played in perceived attractiveness and dominance. This study indicates that both modality (voice vs. face) and gender impact the fundamental dimensions of social perception. Overall, the findings of this dissertation indicate that the affective quality in our voice not only influence how our speech will be remembered but also relate to how we are being socially perceived by others. It would be wise to pay more attention to our tone of voice if we want to make our speech memorable and leave a good impression. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.