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This paper presents the investigation and analysis of speech accommodation effects in data obtained from Spanish learners of German with varying proficiency levels. The production data were recorded during a collaborative map task of the Spanish learners of German among each other and with a native speaker of German. The map task was designed to target words and phrases with specific segmental and suprasegmental characteristics. These characteristics were derived from contrastive analyses of Spanish and German. The main objectives of the paper were to investigate whether segmental and suprasegmental characteristics of the target language German are affected by phonetic accommodation to varying degrees and whether these differences depend on the proficiency level of the speaker or the interlocutor. The statistical analysis, using regression analyses, revealed inconsistent accommodation effects across learners of different proficiency levels as well as different linguistic phenomena. In line with previous findings the results can best be accounted for by an adaptation of a dynamic system approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study is chiefly directed to the way in which birders perceive and evaluate birdsong and how they behave towards it, including in certain rituals in which birdsong contests play an important part. The tradition of songbird competitions as a living cultural heritage is well exemplified by the long tradition of the Finkerei in the Harz region, Germany. In the Harz song contests, I argue, birdsongs are far from "naturalistic". They are "sonic things" that emerge from sophisticated training and experimentation, ritualistic rules, practices of competition, and the judging of birdsongs. In short, they are a deliberately sought outcome. This approach to the Harz contests places the finch song within the concept of a cultural product of an intangible nature. The present paper results from years of participatory observation. From an anthropological perspective, the basic interest behind my research explores how humans, in certain times and places, behave when perceiving music, being exposed to, shaping and evaluating its parameters. In relation to experiences with songbirds the main questions are: what is biological, what is individually learned, what is a social consensus, and what is universal in human musical behaviour? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how pitch accent type and additive particles affect the activation of contrastive alternatives. In Experiment 1, German listeners heard declarative utterances (e.g., The swimmer wanted to put on flippers) and saw four printed words displayed on screen: one that was a contrastive alternative to the subject noun (e.g., diver), one that was non-contrastively related (e.g., pool), the object (e.g., flippers), and an unrelated distractor. Experiment 1 manipulated pitch accent type, comparing a broad focus control condition to two narrow focus conditions: with a contrastive or non-contrastive accent on the subject noun (nuclear L+H* vs. H+L*, respectively, followed by deaccentuation). In Experiment 2, the utterances in the narrow focus conditions were preceded by the unstressed additive particle auch ("also"), which may trigger alternatives itself. It associated with the accented subject. Results showed that, compared to the control condition, participants directed more fixations to the contrastive alternative when the subject was realized with a contrastive accent (nuclear L+H*) than when it was realized with non-contrastive H+L*, while additive particles had no effect. Hence, accent type is the primary trigger for signaling the presence of alternatives (i.e., contrast). Implications for theories of information structure and the processing of additive particles are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a follow-up study of Féry and Kügler (2008. Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 680-703). It reports on an experiment of the F0 height of potential pitch accents in the postfocal region of German sentences and addresses in this way an aspect of the influence of information structure on the intonation of sentences that was left open in the previous article. The results of the experiment showed that, when several constituents are located in this position, they are often in a downstep relation, but are rarely upstepped. In 37% of the cases, the pitch accents are only realized dynamically and there is no down- or upstepping. We interpret these results as evidence that postfocal constituents are phrased independently. The data examined speak against a model of postfocal intonation in which postfocal phrasing is eliminated and all accents are reduced to zero. Instead, the pitch accents are often present, although reduced. Moreover, the facts support the existence of prosodic phrasing of the postfocal constituents; the postfocal position implies an extremely compressed register, but no dephrasing or systematic complete deaccentuation of all pitch accents. We propose adopting a model of German intonation in which prosodic phrasing is determined by syntactic structure and cannot be changed by information structure. The role of information structure in prosody is limited to changes in the register relationship of the different parts of the sentence. Prefocally, there is no or only little register compression because of givenness. Postfocally, register compression is the rule. A model of intonation must take this asymmetry into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. The majority of tinnitus patients suffer from hearing loss. But a subgroup of tinnitus patients show normal hearing thresholds in the conventional pure-tone audiometry (125Hz-8 kHz). Here we explored whether the results of the high frequency audiometry (>8 kHz) provide relevant additional information in tinnitus patients with normal conventional audiometry by comparing those with normal and pathological high frequency audiometry with respect to their demographic and clinical characteristics. Subjects and Methods. From the database of the Tinnitus Clinic at Regensburg we identified 75 patients with normal hearing thresholds in the conventional pure-tone audiometry. We contrasted these patients with normal and pathological high frequency audiogram and compared them with respect to gender, age, tinnitus severity, pitch, laterality and duration, comorbid symptoms and triggers for tinnitus onset. Results. Patients with pathological high frequency audiometrywere significantly older and had higher scores on the tinnitus questionnaires in comparison to patients with normal high frequency audiometry. Furthermore, there was an association of high frequency audiometry with the laterality of tinnitus. Conclusion. In tinnitus patients with normal pure-tone audiometry the high frequency audiometry provides useful additional information. The association between tinnitus laterality and asymmetry of the high frequency audiometry suggests a potential causal role for the high frequency hearing loss in tinnitus etiopathogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes and analyses the 'musical turn' German theatre has undergone in the past fifteen to twenty years, consisting in a re-discovery of the musicality of the theatrical process and event, not a mere inclusion of more music into the theatrical performance. The author focuses on three aspects of this phenomenon: firstly, musicalization in the devising or rehearsal process; secondly, musicalization as an organizational principle of performance; and thirdly, musicalization and the perception process. By looking at productions of Ruedi Häusermann, Sebastian Nübling, Heiner Goebbels, Christoph Marthaler and Einar Schleef, the author finds that musicality helps to introduce new dramaturgies and structures to theatrical performance and to challenge the expectations and meaning-making processes of the audience. For the director and performer musicality provides an alternative (not necessarily mutually exclusive) performative task to work with that shifts the attention from working on character, situation and narrative towards aspects of timing, sound and the polyphony of the theatrical media. For the audience, the inclination of a theatrical event towards the self-referentiality of music is a liberation of the obligation to 'get' the meaning of everything that happens on stage. And potentially, by worrying less about 'what it means', the audience can focus their attention on 'what it is' and thus challenge, widen and reflect on their own modes of perception and observation. At the same time, musicalization in the theatre will always deal with concrete spaces, bodies, texts and para-texts; meaning and coherence can thus be reintroduced through the back door by making use of the connotative referential potential of music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]