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This study investigates an intonation contour of German whose status has notbeen established yet: a globally falling contour with a slight rise at the very end ofthe phrase (FSR). The contour may be said to lie on a phonetic continuum betweenfalling (F) and falling-rising (FR) contours. It is hypothesized that F, FR and FSR dif-ferwith respect to their communicative functions: F is terminal, FR is non-terminal,and FSR is pseudo-terminal, respectively. The hypotheses were tested in two steps.First, measurements in a labelled corpus of spontaneous speech provided the nec-essarybackground information on the phonetics of the contours. In the secondstep, the general hypothesis was approached in a perceptual experiment using theparadigm of a semantic differential: 49 listeners judged 17 systematically gener-atedstimuli on nine semantic scales, such as ‘impolite/polite’. The hypotheses weregenerally confirmed. Both F and FSR were associated with a conclusive statement,while FR was more likely to be judged as marking a question. FSR differs from F inthat it does not express features such as categoricalness, dominance or impolite-ness.The results are interpreted as an instance of the frequency code: the additionof a slight rise means avoidance of extremely low F0 ; the functional consequence isa reduction of communicated dominance.

The interplay of verbal and visual prominence cues has attracted recent attention, but previous findings are inconclusive as to whether and how the two modalities are integrated in the production and perception of prominence. In particular, we do not know whether the phonetic realization of pitch accents is influenced by co-speech beat gestures, and previous findings seem to generate different predictions. In this study, we investigate acoustic properties of prominent words as a function of visual beat gestures in a corpus of read news from Swedish television. The corpus was annotated for head and eyebrow beats as well as sentencelevel pitch accents. Four types of prominence cues occurred particularly frequently in the corpus: (1) pitch accent only, (2) pitch accent plus head, (3) pitch accent plus head plus eyebrows, and (4) head only. The results show that (4) differs from (1-3) in terms of a smaller pitch excursion and shorter syllable duration. They also reveal significantly larger pitch excursions in (2) than in (1), suggesting that the realization of a pitch accent is to some extent influenced by the presence of visual prominence cues. Results are discussed in terms of the interaction between beat gestures and prosody with a potential functional difference between head and eyebrow beats.

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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.