Martine Grice

University of Cologne | UOC · Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Previous studies report that Italian learners of German transfer their L1 prosody to their L2 when marking information status prosodically within noun phrases (NPs). However, these studies were based on a categorical analysis of accentuation based on the presence or absence of pitch accents, which might not provide the full picture of interlanguage...

Previous research has provided evidence of the interaction between eye gaze and turn-taking, showing that turn yielding is generally signalled with mutual gaze, whereby the primary speaker assesses the interlocutor's availability, which is subsequently confirmed by the interlocutor, as the next or secondary speaker reciprocates the gaze. However, t...

Although mentalizing abilities in autistic adults without intelligence deficits are similar to those of control participants in tasks relying on verbal information, they are dissimilar in tasks relying on non-verbal information. The current study aims to investigate mentalizing behavior in autism in a paradigm involving two important nonverbal mean...

BackgroundA prosodic profile for people with schizophrenia has been previously empirically suggested. However, evidence remains inconclusive, particularly with regards to the possible links with psychopathology and the scarcity of substantial data on Italian-speaking individuals.Methods We quantified a large set of prosodic and voice quality featur...

This paper investigates the effect of intonational rises on attention towards, and ultimately, recall of, medial elements in nine-digit lists in German. Non-final triplets (positions 1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, 6) were produced with either a rise or a fall on digits in positions 3 and 6. Rises led to significantly improved recall over falls. Crucially, the n...

Face-to-face communication is highly complex, with information being transmitted via multiple channels simultaneously. Social gaze can regulate conversation, express emotions, and signal interest or disinterest, and eye contact, or a lack thereof, is a powerful visual cue that influences the dynamics of communication. While previous research has sh...

Individuals with schizophrenia generally show difficulties in interpersonal communication. Linguistic analyses shed new light on speech atypicalities in schizophrenia. However, very little is known about conversational interaction management by these individuals. Moreover, the relationship between linguistic features, psychopathology, and patients’...

This pupillometric study investigates the relevance of domain-final intonation for attention-orienting in German, employing a changing-state oddball paradigm with rising, falling and neutral intonation on deviant stimuli. Pupil dilation responses (PDR) to deviants were shown to be affected by their intonation contours, strengthening the case for th...

Backchannels (BCs) are signals produced by conversation partners to support the ongoing turn of the interlocutor. Audible backchannels can have a lexical (yes) or non-lexical form (mhm), consisting of one unit (mhm) or multiple units (mhm yes). In this paper, we analyse the form and function of Multi-Unit Backchannels (MUBs) in Italian conversation...

In face-to-face communication, the interplay between gaze behaviour and backchannels (vocal feedback) is essential for shaping conversational dynamics. This study explores the intricate relationship between these elements in dyadic face-to-face interactions across three conversational contexts: getting to know each other, a task-oriented Tangram di...

Despite prosody being widely recognised as playing a crucial role in oral communication, it is often reportedly neglected in L2 pedagogy. To address this gap, we investigate the effectiveness of training focused on the prosodic marking of information status (IS) in learners of L2 German. We recorded L2 participants with different L1 backgrounds, us...

This paper investigates the effect of intonational rises on attention towards, and ultimately, recall of, medial elements in nine-digit lists in German. Non-final triplets (positions 1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, 6) were produced with either a rise or a fall on digits in positions 3 and 6. Rises led to significantly improved recall over falls. Crucially, the n...

Details We investigated the prosodic patterns of patients with schizophrenia compared to Italian-speaking controls. In addition, we used a very accurate experimental set up to obtain good quality audio, adopted an automated extraction method involving a very large set of cues, and thoroughly investigated the subjective experience of patients with t...

Many studies in the linguistic literature have tried to explain the rhythmic component of speech by resorting to the notion of isochrony. The problems with such approaches have been demonstrated in various recent works, owing to the fact that natural speech is highly irregular and quasi-periodic at best. Rhythm also plays a role in the link between...

This study investigates the variation in phrase-final f0 movements found in dyadic unscripted conversations in Papuan Malay, an Eastern Indonesian language. This is done by a novel combination of exploratory and confirmatory classification techniques. In particular, this study investigates the linguistic factors that potentially drive f0 contour va...

Current research in the field has identified a broadcast newsreading style and described it in terms of variations in prosodic parameters as compared to, for example, a narrative style or conversational speech. However, less is known about how the prosodic style of newsreading has evolved diachronically. With the aim of filling this gap, we compare...

This article investigates the processing of intonational rises and falls when presented unexpectedly in a stream of repetitive auditory stimuli. It examines the neurophysiological correlates (ERPs) of attention to these unexpected stimuli through the use of an oddball paradigm where sequences of repetitive stimuli are occasionally interspersed with...

(accepted for publication in Language, Interaction and Acquistion) Previous research has found that vocal feedback, referred to as backchannels, has positive effects on social interaction, especially by indicating listener engagement. For second language (L2) learners, however, backchannels can be challenging, because their use is bound by cultura...

Background Quantitative electroencephalography (EEG) analysis offers the opportunity to study high-level cognitive processes across psychiatric disorders. In particular, EEG microstates translate the temporal dynamics of neuronal networks throughout the brain. Their alteration may reflect transdiagnostic anomalies in neurophysiological functions th...

Linguistic prosody involves the rhythm and melody of speech. It implicitly enhances or modifies the explicit meaning of spoken words. The literature on linguistic pros-ody related to autism spectrum disorder deals both with the production and perception of a broad range of linguistic functions. These functions range from the formal encoding of gram...

Polar question intonation in Italian is subject to regional variation. Here we investigate how far speakers of one variety (Bari Italian) converge in the production of such questions when playing a game with a partner from a different variety (Lecce Italian). Although these two varieties each have a number of contours in their repertoire, the distr...

This study investigates "stress deafness" in bilingual speakers of Maltese and Maltese English. Although both reportedly have lexical stress, the acoustic cues to prominence appear to be relatively weak. Further, word-initial pitch peaks make pitch an unreliable cue to lexical stress, which can be elsewhere in the word. In a sequence recall task, w...

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis that can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time....

Introduction Patients with schizophrenia present severe communication difficulties in various linguistic areas. In the last two decades research has invested significant effort in trying to better characterize the linguistic profile of patients with schizophrenia, with the purpose to help and guide diagnosis and treatment. Moreover, speech data cou...

Backchannels (BCs; listener signals such as 'mmhm' or 'okay') are a ubiquitous and essential feature of spoken interaction. They are used by listeners predominantly to support the ongoing turn of their interlocutor and to signal understanding and agreement. Listeners seem to be highly sensitive to the exact realisations of BCs and to judge deviatio...

Schizophrenia is characterised by a variety of symptoms, many of which are expressed verbally. However, privacy concerns limit the possibility of collecting and sharing large corpora of schizophrenic speech. As a result, variability in the communicative behaviour of individuals with schizophrenia is currently poorly understood. In this study we exp...

Backchannels (listener signals such as "mmhm" or "okay") are a ubiquitous and essential feature of spoken interaction. They are used by listeners predominantly to support the ongoing turn of their interlocutor and to signal understanding and agreement. Listeners seem to be highly sensitive to the exact realisations of backchannels and to judge devi...

We examined the use of filled pauses in conversations between homogeneous pairs of autistic and non-autistic adults. A corpus of semi-spontaneous speech was used to analyse the rate, lexical type (nasal “uhm” or non-nasal “uh”), and prosodic realisation (rising, level or falling) of filled pauses. We used Bayesian modelling for statistical analysis...

Human communication comprises a complex and dynamic interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication channels. It is an intrinsically multimodal, interactive, time-sensitive and highly coordinated process. However, the multimodal nature of face-to-face interaction needs further study. Here, we present a novel approach to studying dyadic face-to-face...

Silent pauses are a pervasive feature of speech, but one that has not received much attention in the context of atypical populations. We investigated the use of silent pauses in conversations between dyads of autistic as compared to non-autistic adults. Previous research on silent pauses in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is limited to three studies...

[FULL VERSION REMOVED PENDING OFFICIAL PUBLICATION] Purpose: We examined the use of filled pauses in conversations between homogeneous pairs of autistic and non-autistic adults.Methods: A corpus of semi-spontaneous speech was used to analyse the rate, lexical type (nasal “uhm” or non-nasal “uh”), and prosodic realisation (rising, level or falling)...

The organisation of who speaks when in conversation is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of human communication. Research on a wide variety of groups of speakers has revealed a seemingly universal preference for between-speaker transitions consisting of very short silent gaps. Previous research on conversational turn-taking in Autism Spectrum Dis...

The organisation of who speaks when in conversation is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of human communication. Research on a wide variety of groups of speakers has revealed a seemingly universal preference for between-speaker transitions consisting of very short silent gaps. Previous research on conversational turn-taking in Autism Spectrum Dis...

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis which can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time...

Some studies on training effects of pronunciation instruction have claimed that the training of prosodic features has effects at the segmental level and that the training of segmental features has effects at the prosodic level, with greater effects reported when prosody is the main focus of training. This paper revisits this claim by looking at the...

Backchannels (BCs) positively contribute to fluency in social interactions. However, their realisation is language-specific, which can cause miscommunication in intercultural contexts. Nevertheless, backchanneling is not formally taught in most classroom settings. To find out whether L2 learners still manage to acquire a target-like BC behaviour, w...

Download of published version at (valid until March, 19th): https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1gVCZLixzvfdD . Previous studies on the prosodic marking of information status argue that Italian tends to resist deaccentuation of given elements. In particular, Italian reportedly always accents post-focal given information within noun phrases (NPs), so th...

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis which can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time...

ExLing Conference 2022

Autosegmental-metrical phonology has shown itself to be a highly successful framework for the description, analysis and comparison of the prosody of many of the world’s languages. What has contributed to the success of this framework is the fact that there is widespread use of prepackaged units within the model – referred to as “complex primitives”...

This study is about F0 rises in speech and whether they are special in attracting attention. The idea originates from (neuro)cognitive studies reporting that an increase in loudness, pitch, or any other acoustic property in the signal is experienced as looming or approaching by the listener. In our study, we wanted to investigate if this looming al...

Difficulties in interpersonal communication, including conversational skill impairments, are core features of schizophrenia. However, very few studies have performed conversation analyses in a clinical population of schizophrenia patients. Here we investigate the conversational patterns of dialogues in schizophrenia patients to assess possible asso...

Contexts such as “Guess what happened yesterday” lead to expectations as to how unusual and exciting the content of a following utterance will be. This paper investigates how speakers encode this pragmatic meaning in their productions and further evaluates the findings from the listeners’ perspective. Contexts in which the speaker is required to ma...

Introduction Language and conversation are deeply interrelated: language is acquired, structured, practiced in social interactions and linguistic resources (specifically syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic aspects) contribute to finely tuning turn-taking. Nevertheless, most studies focused on verbal aspects of speech in schizophrenia, with scant atte...

BACKGROUND Kenyans are highly multilingual-mother tongue, Kenyan English and Kenyan Kiswahili (co-official languages and linguae francae) Also Sheng (an urban mixed variety) Widespread code-switching [1] [2] [3] Kenyan English Prosody ➢ Little durational reduction of unstressed syllables [4] ➢ Influence from the mother tongue in both reading and sp...

Backchannel (BC) are short verbal and non-verbal signals of acknowledgments, whose realisations differ from language to language and between native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers. Our study is the first comprehensive, cross-linguistic analysis of backchannels in L1 and L2 speakers. We recorded 20 dyads of Italian learners of German in both their...

Since the very beginnings of research into Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), there have been contradicting descriptions of speech in ASD as being “singsongy” or melodic on the one hand and “robotic” or monotonous on the other. We highlight some issues regarding the terminology and methodologies used in previous studies as well as their comparability,...

An introduction to the the range of current theoretical approaches to the prosody of spoken utterances, with practical applications of those theories. Prosody is an extremely dynamic field, with a rapid pace of theoretical development and a steady expansion of its influence beyond linguistics into such areas as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, c...

This paper is concerned with the relation between tonal association and prosodic strength in different tone bearing positions in Maltese wh-words. In these words, tones are associated with the stressed syllable (head association) in indirect and quoted questions, but with the initial syllable (edge association) in direct questions. In a language th...

For conversational agents’ speech, either all possible sentences have to be prerecorded by voice actors or the required utterances can be synthesized. While synthesizing speech is more flexible and economic in production, it also potentially reduces the perceived naturalness of the agents among others due to mistakes at various linguistic levels. I...

Quantitative studies in linguistics almost always involve data points that are related to each other, such as multiple data points from the same participant, multiple texts from the same book, author, genre, or register, or multiple languages from the same language family. Statistical procedures that fail to account for the relatedness of observati...

This paper is concerned with the contributions of signal-driven and expectation-driven mechanisms to a general understanding of the phenomenon of prosodic prominence from a cross-linguistic perspective. It serves as an introduction to the concept of prosodic prominence and discusses the eight papers in the Special Issue, which cover a genetically d...

Prosodic marking of information status in L2 German. The analysis makes use of periodic-energy-related measures

Patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders experience severe difficulties in interpersonal communication, as described by traditional psychopathology and current research on social cognition. From a linguistic perspective, pragmatic abilities are crucial for successful communication. Empirical studies have shown that these abilities are signifi...

This paper investigates neurophysiological correlates of prosodic prominence in German with two EEG experiments. Experiment 1 tested different degrees of prominence (three accent types: L+H*, H*, H+L* and deaccentuation) in the absence of context, making the acoustic signal the only source for attention orienting. Experiment 2 tested L+H* and H+L*...

Accentuation influences selective attention and the depth of semantic processing during online speech comprehension. We investigated the processing of semantically congruent and incongruent words in a language that presents cues to prosodic prominences in the region of the utterance occurring after the focussed information (the post-focal region)....

Pitch height and gaze duration are used to infer other people's mental states, e.g. their attentional focus, attitudes or emotions. To shed light on the interplay of these two cues we varied pitch height in German utterances and gaze duration in a paradigm including a virtual character and different objects. At a group level, greater pitch height a...

Speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been claimed, and are generally assumed, to produce atypical intonation. Previous research, however, is very limited and findings are contradictory, with claims ranging from "robotic" to "singsongy" intonation styles in ASD. We employ a novel method to assess intonation styles in a large corpus of s...

A sequence of spoken digits is easier to recall if the digits are grouped into smaller chunks (e.g., through the insertion of pauses). It has been claimed that intonation does not facilitate recall over and above the effect achieved by pauses. This may be related to the fact that past research has used synthesized intonation contours. In this repli...

The Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR) defines foreign language competence as communicative competence, emphasizing its interactional aspect. Nonetheless, L2 (second language) assessment often focuses on the quantification of grammar and lexical competence, neglecting interactional aspects, which are only subject to an impr...

Objective: To prospectively evaluate the effect of PSA- and VIM DBS on speech in ET patients. Methods: Leads were implanted bilaterally with contacts placed in both VIM and PSA. Thirteen patients were analyzed pre- and postoperatively. Preoperative speech of ET patients was compared to healthy controls. PSA- and VIM-DBS were evaluated in a randomi...

Maltese question word interrogatives are shown to have an alternation in the association of postlexical tones with the question word. Tones associate with the left edge of the question word in direct questions, and with the lexically stressed syllable in indirect questions and when quoted. This alternation holds regardless of the metrical structure...

In recent years there has been increasing recognition of the vital role of intonation in speech communication. While contemporary models represent intonation—the tune—and the text that bears it on separate autonomous tiers, this paper distils previously unconnected findings across diverse languages that point to important interactions between these...

Poster for the 2nd Prosody Visualisation Challenge (PVC2)

A widespread approach to research on intonation categories involves extracting relevant landmarks in the tune (e.g. F0 turning points) and relating them to relevant landmarks in the text (e.g. phone boundaries). This approach is problematic, both in theoretical terms (e.g. no consensus as to what is a relevant landmark in either domain) and in prac...

Annotating intonation is a considerable challenge, since not only intonational form but also its meaning are complex in terms of their internal make-up and contextual variation. Since the advent of the au-tosegmental-metrical approach to intonation in the 1980s, the annotation of intonation has continued to be a matter of debate, witnessed by the c...

We show that L2 speakers of German produce more backchannel tokens with a flat intonation contour than L1 speakers. Furthermore, L2 speakers do not distinguish the prosodic realisation of nonlexical backchannels ("mm-hm") from that of filled pauses in the clear and precise way of L1 speakers. In line with our previous results from a mousetracking e...

The framework of dynamical systems offers powerful tools to understand the relation between stability and variability in human cognition in general and in speech in particular. In the current paper, we propose a dynamical systems approach to the description of German nuclear pitch accents in focus marking to account for both the categorical as well...

Annotating intonation is a considerable challenge, since not only intonational form but also its meaning are complex in terms of their internal make-up and contextual variation. Since the advent of the au-tosegmental-metrical approach to intonation in the 1980s, the annotation of intonation has continued to be a matter of debate, witnessed by the c...

In the variety of Italian spoken in Bari, polar questions typically have a complex rising-falling(-rising) tune, extending from the last lexical stress to the end of the phrase, whereas statements have a low-falling tune. When polar questions end in a word with final stress, the realization of the complex tune has little time to unfold and thus ris...

The impressionistic characterisation of intonation as "robotic" or "singsongy" is frequent in many phonetics-related fields, such as forensic linguistics, clinical linguistics, perceptual dialectology and language acquisition. Despite its potential for linguistics, however, the characterisation of intonation as flat or sing-songy remains ill-define...