This study examines the interplay of (verbal) prosody with (visual) head and eyebrow movements in a 24-minute corpus of Swedish television news readings. The paper focuses on 'double' beat gestures, asking whether their occurrence relates to a word's lexical prominence structure (simplex; compound), to lexical tonal prosody (Accent 1; Accent 2), or rather to prominence levels (+/-focal accent; +/-nuclear position). The results suggest that double eyebrow beats are a marginal phenomenon. Double head beats are also rare (only 28 of the 688 words annotated for head beats in our 4088word corpus), but their usage follows a clear pattern: There is no preference for the nuclear position, but a strong preference to occur on a focally-accented compound (Accent 2), which is usually realized with two pitch peaks. In conjunction with previous findings on (single) head beats, the present results suggest that a head beat in this type of data can associate with lexical (primary or secondary) stress in case the stressed syllable is also marked by a (tonal or intonational) pitch peak.

Chichimec (Otomanguean) has two tones, high and low, and a phonological three-way phonation contrast: modal /V/, breathy /V¨/, and creaky /Ṽ/. Tone and phonation type contrasts are used independently. This paper investigates the acoustic realization of modal, breathy, and creaky vowels; the timing of phonation in non-modal vowels; and the production of tone in combination with different phonation types. The results of cepstral peak prominence and three spectral tilt measures showed that phonation type contrasts are not distinguished by the same acoustic measures for women and men. In line with expectations for laryngeally complex languages, phonetic modal and non-modal phonation are sequenced in phonological breathy and creaky vowels. With respect to the timing pattern, however, the results show that non-modal phonation is not, as previously reported, mainly located in the middle of the vowel. Non-modal phonation is, instead, predominantly realized in the second half of phonological breathy and creaky vowels. Tone is distinguished in all three phonation types, and non-modal vowels do not exhibit distinct F0 ranges except for creaky vowels produced by women in which F0 declines in the creaky portion. The results of the acoustic analysis provide additional insights to phonological accounts of laryngeal complexity in Chichimec.

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