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Background/Objectives: This study sets out to explore how L1 Mandarin speakers with varying lengths of L2 experience perceived English focus interrogative tune, L*H-H%, within the framework of the autosegmental–metrical model. Methods: Eighteen Mandarin speakers with varying lengths of residence in the United States and eighteen English native speakers were invited to perceive prosodic prominence and judge the naturalness of focus prosody tunes. Results: For the perception of on-focus pitch accent L*, Mandarin speakers performed well in the prominence detection task but not in the focus identification task. For post-focus edge tones, we found that phrase accents were more susceptible to L1 influences than boundary tones due to the varying degrees of cross-linguistic similarity between these intonational categories. The results also show that even listeners with extended L2 experience were not proficient in their perception of L2 interrogative focus tunes. Conclusions: This study reveals the advantage of considering the degree of L1-L2 similarity and the necessity to examine cross-linguistic influences on L2 perception of prosody separately in phonological and phonetic dimensions.

Investigations of affective prosodic processing have demonstrated a decline with aging. It is unclear, however, whether this decline affects all or specific emotions. Also, little is known about the ability of syntactic resolution ambiguity with the use of prosody in aging. Twenty older (age range = 70–75) and 20 younger adults (age range = 20–25) performed an affective (happiness, neutrality, sadness, surprise, fear, and anger) and a linguistic (subject/object ambiguities) prosody task. Relative to young participants, older participants faced difficulty decoding affective prosody, particularly negative emotions, and syntactic prosody, in particular the subject reading condition. A marginally positive correlation was found between the affective and syntactic prosody tasks in the group of older individuals, but no gender differences in either prosodic task. The findings of the affective prosody task are discussed under the prism of the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory, whereas general parsing strategies can account for the preference for the object reading condition.

Prosodic elements are considered the main parts of the Prosody science. So, learning these elements and the system that governs them plays a critical role in traditional prosody. In addition, recognizing the different types of elements (Salim va Mozahaf) shapes a big part of prosody. By realizing the defects of the traditional system, prosodists created new prosodic systems. In this way, each of them introduced their desired prosodic elements. But in the meantime, the explanation of the relationship between the elements in the new prosody and the suggestion of a structure for them was neglected. As a result, it confused the basics of prosody and caused difficulty in learning it. This research aims to identify the relationships between the elements and structurally explain them. The results of the study show two types of structural relationships between Persian prosodic elements. The first is formed based on the increase and decrease of the last syllables of the elements, and the second is based on the old concept of prosodic circles. By using it, all elements can be derived from the circles we call ‘elemental circles’. Based on these two types of relationships, two new prosodic structures are introduced: linear structure and circular structure. The common result shows that, regardless of rare ideas, the number of correct elements of Persian Prosody reaches 44, which are: 1 one-syllable, 2 two-syllable, 7 three-syllable, 13 four-syllable, and 21 five-syllable elements.

This paper explores an instance of prosodic augmentation (Lovick 2023: 382) via devoicing in Mẽbêngôkre, a Jê language spoken in Brazilian Amazonia. While segment lengthening is usually associated with prosodic augmentation, in Mẽbêngôkre high vowels can be devoiced, besides also lengthened, to express intensity. While all vowel segments in Mẽbêngôkre can be lengthened for expressive means, only high vowels /i ɨ u/ can be both lengthened and devoiced. This talk contributes to studies on expressiveness and iconicity in language by showing that vowel devoicing can also be targeted by prosodic augmentation.

Prosodic realization of focus has been a widely investigated topic across languages and modalities. Simultaneous focus strategies are intriguing to see how they interact regarding their functional and temporal alignment. We explored the multichannel (manual and nonmanual) realization of focus in Turkish Sign Language. We elicited data with focus type, syntactic roles and movement type variables from 20 signers. The results revealed the focus is encoded via increased duration in manual signs, and nonmanuals do not necessarily accompany focused signs. With a multichanneled structure, sign languages use two available channels or opt for one to express focushood.

Despite extensive research efforts, it is unclear how autistic and non-autistic individuals compare in their ability to recognize emotions. Differences in demographic and task factors have been proposed as explanations for divergent findings, but limitations in samples and designs have obscured insight into this possibility. This study investigated the extent of emotion recognition differences among autistic adults and the influence of these factors upon them. We recruited a large sample of autistic and non-autistic adults ( N  = 1,239) spanning across adulthood (18–76 years). In three online experiments, we compared their performance in recognizing emotions from basic facial expressions, complex expressions conveyed by the eyes alone, and prosodic elements of speech. Autistic individuals performed as well as non-autistic ones in terms of recognition accuracy/sensitivity across measures and emotional categories but took longer to do so. We also detected comparable influences of age, estimated intelligence quotient, and gender (as well as task demands) on both groups. While autistic adults may differ in how they process emotional stimuli, they can do so effectively when given sufficient time. Accordingly, efforts to help autistic individuals improve their ability to recognize emotions may be more fruitful if they focus on efficiency over accuracy. Additionally, reaction time data may offer greater insight than accuracy into differences between autistic and non-autistic individuals on emotion recognition tasks. The similar effects of the demographic and task factors we analyzed on both groups suggest that explanations of the discrepancies in prior literature lie elsewhere.

The aim of this systematic review was to identify the presence and nature of relationships between specific forms of aprosodia (i.e., expressive and receptive emotional and linguistic prosodic deficits) and other cognitive-communication deficits and disorders in individuals with right hemisphere damage (RHD) due to stroke. One hundred and ninety articles from 1970 to February 2020 investigating receptive and expressive prosody in patients with relatively focal right hemisphere brain damage were identified via database searches. Fourteen articles were identified that met inclusion criteria, passed quality reviews, and included sufficient information about prosody and potential co-occurring deficits. Twelve articles investigated receptive emotional aprosodia, and two articles investigated receptive linguistic aprosodia. Across the included studies, receptive emotional prosody was not systematically associated with hemispatial neglect, but did co-occur with deficits in emotional facial recognition, interpersonal interactions, or emotional semantics. Receptive linguistic processing was reported to co-occur with amusia and hemispatial neglect. No studies were found that investigated the co-occurrence of expressive emotional or linguistic prosodic deficits with other cognitive-communication impairments. This systematic review revealed significant gaps in the research literature regarding the co-occurrence of common right hemisphere disorders with prosodic deficits. More rigorous empirical inquiry is required to identify specific patient profiles based on clusters of deficits associated with right hemisphere stroke. Future research may determine whether the co-occurrences identified are due to shared cognitive-linguistic processes, and may inform the development of evidence-based assessment and treatment recommendations for individuals with cognitive-communication deficits subsequent to RHD.

The accent patterns of Turkish have been analyzed in various ways, yet there is still no consensus on their prosodic structure. Focusing on constructions with suffixes, clitics, and auxiliaries, we examine the extent to which the accent patterns must be lexically specified, and how to best represent them. It is shown that the accent patterns are predictable for clitics, mostly predictable for auxiliaries, and less predictable for suffixes. A grid-based approach that encodes ‘accent’ and ‘(un)accentability’ separately is proposed to analyze both the predictable and the unpredictable patterns in a unified way.