We analyze the interaction between facial gestures and intonation in the distinction between information-seeking and incredulity yes/no questions in two languages We examine changes in intonation in both languages and the interaction with gestures. The importance of visual cues in the identification of tune meaning is more relevant when both question types have the same contour.

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The present research investigates what drives the prosodic marking of contrastive information. For example, a typically developing speaker of a Germanic language like Dutch generally refers to a pink car as a "PINK car" (accented words in capitals) when a previously mentioned car was red. The main question addressed in this paper is whether contrastive intonation is produced with respect to the speaker's or (also) the listener's perspective on the preceding discourse. Furthermore, this research investigates the production of contrastive intonation by typically developing speakers and speakers with autism. The latter group is investigated because people with autism are argued to have difficulties accounting for another person's mental state and exhibit difficulties in the production and perception of accentuation and pitch range. To this end, utterances with contrastive intonation are elicited from both groups and analyzed in terms of function and form of prosody using production and perception measures. Contrary to expectations, typically developing speakers and speakers with autism produce functionally similar contrastive intonation as both groups account for both their own and their listener's perspective. However, typically developing speakers use a larger pitch range and are perceived as speaking more dynamically than speakers with autism, suggesting differences in their use of prosodic form.

The present study investigates to what extent acoustic cues to word stress facilitate both offline and online word processing in Papuan Malay. Previous production research has shown acoustic evidence for word-stress patterns in this language, counter to earlier predictions. A discussion of the literature on word stress perception and word stress in Papuan Malay is provided and complemented with reports of three word recognition tasks. The first two presented sequences of acoustically manipulated syllable dyads to native listeners in an offline word recognition task. This was done in order to investigate the individual contribution of each of the acoustic cues (F0, duration, intensity, spectral tilt) to the perception of word stress. F0 appeared a relevant cue when stimuli were embedded in a phrase, not in isolation. A follow-up reaction time experiment (online processing) investigated to what extent word recognition was facilitated when either an acoustically weak or an acoustically strong syllable was the cue to identify a word. Reaction times were shorter for strong syllables than for weak syllables. The outcomes suggest that Papuan Malay has a form of perceptually relevant word stress, which is particularly salient for irregular (ultimate) stress rather than for regular (penultimate) stress.