This dissertation examines word-prosody of ciTonga, a Malawian Bantu language spoken by lakeshore people of northern Malawi. It is argued that the real word-prosody in this language (and perhaps many Bantu languages) revolves around the idea of Strong Accent Constituency, power relations between segments, syllables and between lower and higher prosodic categories as determined by Universal Guidelines such as SONORITY, FINALITY, EDGENESS and PROSODIC HIERARCHY as well as constraints which favour language- or context-specific Strong Accent Constituents (PROSODIC STEM, ACCENT FOOT, STEM-SYLLABLE1, PENULTIMATE SYLLABLE or FINAL SYLLABLE). Tone and prosodic morphemes such as Minimal Prosodic Words and Reduplicative Prosodic Morphemes also seem to be heavily regulated by Strong Accent Constituency. The empirical bases are three speech styles found in ciTonga (Nkhata-Bay Variety) namely, formal, common, and elderly speech styles. It is one of several understudied and endangered languages in Malawi. This study therefore is in line with one of the goals of the University of Malawi's Centre for Language Studies, where this candidate serves as a member, which is to prioritize research activities on such languages. The candidate is a native speaker of ciTonga and , as such, he is primary source of most of the data. Other methods such as elicitation and focus group discussions were conducted with informants not only to get to the bottom of the matter, but to also understand social issues underlying language variation. The dissertation has been presented in 6 chapters. Chapter 1 presents introductory remarks. These include the problem statement, a note on methodology, summary of findings, theoretical precedents, and, finally, organization of the dissertation. Chapter 2 presents basic facts about the language under study. These include language classification, previous works on ciTonga, speech sounds, the syllable, tone, as well as nominal and verbal morphology. Chapter 3 presents a proposal for the theory of Strong Accent Constituency. It presents the data on vowel and consonant deletion which motivates this theory analysis. Then attempts are made to account for the facts in terms of stress-accent theory and Downing's (2006b) Morpheme-Based Templates Theory both of which are found to be slightly problematic to account for segment deletion and preservation patterns exhibited in ciTonga. Finally, the chapter introduces the theory and accounts for the facts in terms of Strong Accent Constituent Theory. Chapter 4 presents formally the theory of Interaction between Tone and Strong Accent Constituents. The chapter presents the data on tone assignment in basic verbs, simple past tense verbs and present progressive aspect verbs which motivate this type of theory analysis. Attempts are then made to account for the facts in terms of tone alignment theory (as argued by Mtenje 2006), autosegmental accent (Clements and Goldsmith 1984) and 'pitch-accent' or accentual properties of tone in Bantu languages (as hinted upon by Downing 2004). All these theoretical perspectives are found to be slightly inadequate to account for tone distribution patterns in ciTonga. On the other hand, a theory based on Interaction between Tone and Strong Accent Constituents is shown to account for the facts slightly better. Chapter 5 presents formally proposals for Strong Accent Constituent-Based Templates as a theory of morphology-prosody interfaces in ciTonga and perhaps many other Bantu languages with a Strong Accent Constituent system. It presents the data on general phonological words, Minimal Prosodic Words and Reduplicative Prosodic Morphemes. It then reviews two competing theories in the literature within the Generalized Templates Theory namely, the Prosodic Hierarchy-Based Templates Theory and the Morpheme-Based Templates Theory both of which have a goal to account for morphology-prosody interfaces. Both these theories are shown to be slightly inadequate to account for parameters exhibited by phonological words in ciTonga. On the other hand, it is suggested that a theory of Strong Accent Constituent-Based Templates may account for the facts slightly better. Chapter 6 summarizes and concludes the dissertation.

Ngalakgan is an Australian language of the Gunwinyguan family, spoken fluently by just a few people in the mid Roper River area of the Top End. The thesis is a description and examination of the phonology, prosody, and morphology of Ngalakgan, based on several years of fieldwork. Ngalakgan is a language with a rich inventory of classically Gunwinyguan morphological features, including noun class agreement for all major and some minor word classes, compounding of both nouns and verbs, and a rich array of modifying and inflectional prefixes and suffixes. In Ngalakgan, there is a distinction between two kinds or 'levels' of morphology: 'root'-level and 'word'-level. Root-level morphology is lexicalised and unproductive. It is restricted to the tense/aspect/mood inflection of the small closed class of 'finite' verb roots, and to the large closed class of compounds of these roots. Word-level morphology is productive, and includes almost all prefixes, all (non-tensed) suffixes and all clitics. Only word-level structure is consistently reflected in prosodic structure; forms which are complex only at the root-level are treated as prosodic units. I show that all word-level morphemes constitute prosodic domains: every word-level stem, affix and clitic potentially begins a new domain for metrical foot structure. Geminates and glottal stops are over-represented at morpheme boundaries in complex words. In addition, they are subject to complex, non-local alternations with simple stops and zero, respectively, in Ngalakgan and related languages. The alternations are conditioned by preceding geminates and voiceless obstruent clusters, as well as by prosodic and morphological structure. I propose that voiceless obstruent clusters constitute 'boundary signals' to morphological structure, in a similar fashion to stress and, like stress, are 'licensed' by the organisation of intonation. Ngalakgan displays a quantitive-sensitive stress system in roots which is apparently unique to languages of this area. Heavy syllables in Ngalakgan are those which are articulatorily and perceptually complex: those in which the coda is followed by a consonant with a distinct place of articulation. Geminates, homorganic nasal+stop clusters and glottal stops interact with this distinction in ways which are not predicted by current prosodic theories.

This person-centered analytic approach identifies homogeneous offender subtypes in terms of psychopathic trait profiles and facilitates examination of correlates that may be linked with specific subtypes. Prosody is an external correlate that contains a wealth of information relevant to disruptions in cognition and affect and may offer novel insight into different psychopathic subtypes. The current study examined prosodic output in a male offender sample (n = 469) within the context of the clinical Psychopathy Checklist – Revised interview (PCL-R; Hare, 2003). Audio recorded speech samples were drawn from offender responses to affectively-charged PCL-R interview questions representing differing levels of valence and arousal. Generally consistent with previous literature, LPA results indicated that a four-class solution yielded the best model fit for the allocation of individual cases to subtypes with high overall classification accuracy (85%). Results of external validation analyses using mixed effects multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant two- and three-way interactions (psychopathy subtype x valence x arousal) for both speech production and variability indices that helped differentiate the subtypes. Overall, the current study suggests that meaningful differences exist in terms of prosodic output within psychopathic offender subtypes, which may be related to dysfunction in underlying affective processes. Implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed.

Prosodic focus is phonetically realized by increasing duration, F0 and intensity on the focused constituents in a sentence. In some languages, there is a concomitant compression of F0 and intensity after the focused item, referred to as post-focus compression (PFC). Southern Min is a tone language that does not have PFC, while Beijing Mandarin is a tone language that does. Like Mandarin, American English has PFC; unlike Mandarin, American English has lexical stress rather than lexical tone. The current dissertation investigated the phonetic realization of focus in second language Mandarin by Southern Min and English learners and its realization in English by Mandarin learners. Second language experience was also manipulated in each of the investigations. The findings were that younger Southern Min speakers, who used more L2 Mandarin than the mid-age and older speakers, produced substantial PFC in Mandarin. Chinese-heritage American learners, who were exposed to Mandarin earlier than non-Chinese-heritage learners, produced some PFC in Mandarin while non-Chinese-heritage learners did not produce any. Finally, Chinese students in college with longer residencies in the United States produced more PFC in English than those with shorter residencies. American English speakers were also found to have more difficulties producing contour tones compared to the high-level tone on target focused items in L2 Mandarin while Mandarin Chinese speakers had more difficulties in producing unstressed syllables compared to stressed syllables on target focused items in L2 English. Overall, the results support the Speech Learning Model prediction that similarities in L1 and L2 sound system result in difficulty acquiring L2 sounds. This may be especially true for prosody because there are interactions between word- and sentence-level patterns. The results also confirm that age of learning is especially important for native-like acquisition of an L2; however, for early learners, the amount of L2 use and length of residence in the L2-speaking environment also clearly impact the acquisition of L2 prosody. Finally, the results suggest that production of PFC in a language that requires it provides a good index of second language speech proficiency. / 2015-10-17

In this dissertation, I examine the marking of focus and givenness in Nte?kepmxcin (Thompson River Salish). The focus is, roughly, the answer to a wh-question, and is highlighted by the primary sentential accent in stress languages like English. This has been formalized as the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle. Given material is old information, and is de-accented in languages like English. Nte?kepmxcin is a stress language, but marks focus structurally. However, I argue that the structure has a prosodie motivation: the clause is restructured such that the focus is leftmost in the intonational phrase. It follows that Salish focus structures lack the special semantics that motivates the use of English structural focus (clefts). As a theoretical contribution, I show that the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle does not account for focus marking in all stress languages, nor does the "distress-given" generalization account for the marking of given information. This is because focus surfaces leftmost, while the nuclear stress position is rightmost. Instead of "stress-focus", I propose that alignment with prosodie phrase edges is the universally common thread in focus marking. This mechanism enables listeners to rapidly recover the location of the focus, by identifying coarse-grained phonological categories (p-phrases and i-phrases). In Thompson River Salish, the focus is associated with the leftmost p-phrase in the matrix intonational phrase. The analysis unifies the marking of focus across languages by claiming that focus is always marked prosodically, by alignment to a prosodie category. The study combines syntactic analysis of focus utterances with their phonetic realization and semantic characteristics. As such, this dissertation is a story about the interfaces. This research is based on a corpus of conversational data as well as single sentence elicitations, all of which are original data collected during fieldwork. The second contribution of this dissertation is thus methodological: I have developed various fieldwork techniques for collecting both spontaneous and scripted conversational discourses. The empirical contribution that results is a collection of conversational discourses, to add to the single speaker traditional texts already recorded for Nte?kepmxcin. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

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This study investigates pause duration between and within utterances in the speech of 20 people with different degrees and types of aphasia: 15 with fluent aphasia and five with nonfluent aphasia. It also examines within utterance pause durations as a function of utterance position. Using aphasia speech samples collected in a previous study by Harmon (2018), Praat acoustic analysis software was used to segment words and periods of pause and measure pause duration within and between utterances. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, including pause duration mean, standard deviations, and interquartile range. Speech pauses were also categorized by the percentage of pause durations greater than 250 ms, 500 ms, 750 ms, and one second. Nonfluent aphasia presents higher mean durations of both between and within utterance pauses than fluent aphasia. Speakers with fluent and nonfluent aphasia subtypes exhibit a larger proportion of pauses longer than one second between utterances than within them. Between utterances, there is a positive association between increase in aphasia severity and an increase in pause duration. Within utterances, speech from individuals with moderately severe aphasia have longer mean pause durations than mild or very mild cases. Individuals with both fluent and nonfluent aphasia demonstrate increased pause durations in the initial sentence position. Further research will provide insight into how this compares with typical speech and how these pause patterns affect the communicative effectiveness of the speaker.

There is a paucity of research regarding autistic adults, yet as autistic individuals grow to adulthood, they are often met with several barriers because of their differences from the neurotypical (NT) population. Given the demands of adult social interaction, some of the social difficulties experienced by autistic adults are likely related to emotion processing and prosody function. With sensory processing differences added as a diagnostic criterion for autism within the last decade, an investigation into its relationship with emotional processing, another marked difficulty for this population, is warranted. There are logical connections between sensory processing, emotion, and prosody, such that an individual is required to detect the slight variations in pitch, stress, and pausing of prosody and have a typical and functional understanding of emotion to be able to comprehend the full meaning behind the prosodic cues of a speaker. Additionally, a speaker needs to understand these same sensory and emotional aspects in order to express typical prosody and have their full message, spoken and unspoken, be received by the listener. Thus, we hypothesized that there would be positive relationships between emotion, sensory processing, and prosody difficulties, and that sensory processing would act as a mediator between emotion and prosody. This study involved an online survey (n = 639) and an in-person component (n = 51) of NT and autistic young adults aged 18-27. Participants completed questionnaires and behavioral measures related to emotion, sensory processing, and prosody. Results revealed positive relationships between the three constructs and that sensory processing (especially auditory processing) was, indeed, a mediator between emotion and prosody. An exploratory analysis between males and females revealed no difference in prosody perception or production but differences in the role emotion plays in the above model between the sexes. This study provides a potential bridge between the NT and autistic communities and clinical implications for working with autistic individuals or those who express autistic traits.

Prosody is known in linguistics as the "suprasegmental" features of language such as syllable stress and intonation. It is also known in the fields of poetics and musicology with alternate definitions and modeling practices. Concepts of prosody are further compounded when considering prosodic phenomena throughout the languages of the world. While the resulting lack of a universal concept of prosody may be tolerable in such a variety of paradigms, there is one paradigm that requires a unified model of prosody. This is the paradigm of hymn translation, which requires prosodic features to align not only musically, poetically, and linguistically, but also cross-linguistically. This thesis compiles existing practices of prosodic modeling in all these areas as well as the prosodic phenomena of a hymn corpus in order to construct a unified model of prosody that can guide the alignment of prosodic features when translating hymns. Though principally designed for the practical purpose of hymn translation, this model also offers theoretical considerations for the definition, nature, and modeling of prosody.

This study is an examination of how prosodic pitch and intensity compare in autistic individuals and neurotypical individuals. Ten-minute recordings of casual conversation were taken and analyzed. Participants included 11 autistic individuals and 11 neurotypical individuals with six males and five females in each group. The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, 2nd Edition (ADOS-2; Lord et al., 2012) prosody rating scale was used to collect a perceptual evaluation of each participan's prosody, and Praat acoustic analysis software was used to collect measures of pitch and intensity over the 10-minute period to investigate how speech characteristics change with conversation partner familiarity. Results revealed significant prosodic differences between autistic and neurotypical individuals. Both mean speaking pitch and intensity were found to be lower in the autistic group compared to the neurotypical group. The ADOS-2 (2012) measure of prosody was found to be ineffective in accurately capturing all individuals in the study who were autistic. A more comprehensive rating scale was suggested in order to adequately identify autistic individuals according to their prosodic characteristics. Results showed significant differences across sex in pitch and intensity, with males having a lower mean speaking pitch than females, as was expected. Remarkable differences were also observed between autistic male speakers and neurotypical male speakers. A lower pitch variability and lower pitch range were discovered in the autistic male speakers compared to neurotypical male speakers. Male speakers demonstrated greater intensity variability than female speakers. No changes were found in pitch or intensity for either neurological group as conversation partner familiarity increased. This may have been due to the nature of the conversation, which was structured as an interview in a single session. The findings of this study have clinical implications and are hoped to be helpful in understanding prosodic features of autistic adults. This can lead to better assessment and treatment of autistic individuals, supporting them in their daily functioning and ability to form and maintain relationships.