Speakers in conversations may adapt their turn pitch relative to that of preceding turns to signal alignment with their interlocutor. However, the reference frame for pitch matching across turns is still unclear. Researchers studying pitch in the context of conversation have argued for an initializing approach, in which turn pitch must be judged relative to pitch in preceding turns. However, perceptual studies have indicated that listeners are able to reliably identify the location of pitch values within an individual speaker's range; that is, even without conversational context, they are able to normalize to speakers. This would imply that speakers might match normalized pitch instead of absolute pitch. Using a combined quantitative-qualitative approach, we investigate the relationship between pitch in adjacent turns in spontaneous German conversation. We use two different methods of evaluating pitch in adjacent turns, reflecting normalizing and initializing approaches respectively. We find that the results are well correlated with conversational participants' evaluation of the conversation. Furthermore, evaluating locations with matched or mismatched pitch can help distinguish between blind and face-to-face conversational situations, as well as identifying locations where specific discourse strategies (such as tag questions) have been deployed.

Speakers and listeners have been shown to use phonetic cues to help them in tracking the ongoing structure of conversational interaction, but fragmentation between qualitative and quantitative research means that the forms and functions of these cues have been given varying characterizations. The current study explores prosodic variation in contrastive structures in conversational data, using a combined methodology adopting aspects from both qualitative (conversation analysis) and quantitative (experimental phonetics/phonology) approaches. Statistical and conversation-analytical methods used together reveal relationships between prosodic variation and interactional function, such as variations in pitch range across adjacent turns being linked to the presence of ‘stepwise' topic changes.

This study adopts a multiple-methods approach to the investigation of prosody, drawing on insights from a quantitative methodology (experimental prosody research) as well as a qualitative one (conversation analysis). We use a k-means cluster analysis to investigate prosodic patterns in conversational sequences involving lexico-semantic contrastive structures. This combined methodology demonstrates that quantitative/statistical methods are a valuable tool for making relatively objective characterizations of acoustic features of speech, while qualitative methods are essential for interpreting the quantitative results. We find that in sequences that maintain global prosodic characteristics across contrastive structures, participants orient to interactional problems, such as determining who has the right to the floor, or avoiding disruption of an ongoing interaction. On the other hand, in sequences in which the global prosody is different across contrastive structures, participants do not generally appear to be orienting to such problems of alignment. Our findings expand the interpretation of “contrastive prosody” that is commonly used in experimental prosody approaches, while providing a way for conversation-analytic research to improve quantification and generalizability of findings.

This paper is a first investigation into the influence of the pitch range and the intensity variation on the number of subscribers, views and likes of YouTube Creators. A total of ten minutes of speech material from five English and five North-American YouTubers was analyzed. The results for pitch range and intensity variation suggest that an increase in both parameters results in higher subscriber counts. For views, there was no influence of pitch range, but an increase in intensity variation results in a lower number of views. Pitch range and intensity variation had no influence on the like count. Furthermore, both origin and gender had an influence on the results. Ultimately, this study will provide further information for the phonetic research of charisma (i.e., the perceived charm, competence, power, and persuasiveness of a speaker), as it is suspected that the acoustic features that have so far been connected to charisma also play an important role in the success of a YouTuber and their channel.

Fragmentation between formal and functional approaches to prosodic variation is an ongoing problem in linguistic research. In particular, the frameworks of the Phonetics of Talk-in-Interaction (PTI) and Empirical Phonology (EP) take very different theoretical and methodological approaches to this kind of variation. We argue that it is fruitful to adopt the insights of both PTI's qualitative analysis and EP's quantitative analysis and combine them into a multiple-methods approach. One realm in which it is possible to combine these frameworks is in the analysis of discourse topic structure and the prosodic cues relevant to it. By combining a quantitative and a qualitative approach to discourse topic structure, it is possible to give a better account of the observed variation in prosody, for example in the case of fundamental frequency (F0) peak timing, which can be explained in terms of pitch accent distribution over different topic structure categories. Similarly, local and global patterns in speech rate variation can be better explained and motivated by adopting insights from both PTI and EP in the study of topic structure. Combining PTI and EP can provide better accounts of speech data as well as opening up new avenues of investigation which would not have been possible in either approach alone.