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In the present study, we test whether adult listeners detect phonological contrasts faster and more accurately in non-native infant-directed speech (IDS) than in non-native adult-directed speech (ADS). 21 participants listened to pairs of speech signals and their task was to decide as quickly as possible whether the signals constitute the same or different words. Each pair of signals contained target vowels or consonants representing a certain category of contrast that was phonologically relevant in a given language but not in Polish, i.e., the native language of the participants of the listening test. The signals were presented in a random order, and each pair occurred in the material twice. Although we demonstrated significant acoustic-phonetic differences between the utterances realized in the IDS and ADS speaking styles, the listeners in our study were not significantly more accurate or faster in the identification of contrasts in either IDS or ADS stimuli.

The languages of Central and Eastern Europe addressed in this chapter form a typologically divergent collection that includes Slavic (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, pluricentric Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian), Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian), Finno-Ugric (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian), and Romance (Romanian). Their prosodic features and structures have been explored to various depths, from different theoretical perspectives, sometimes on the basis of relatively sparse material. Still, enough is known to see that their typological divergence as well as other factors contribute to vivid differences in their prosodic systems. While belonging to intonational languages, they differ in pitch patterns and their usage, duration, and rhythm (some involve phonological duration), as well as prominence mechanisms, accentuation, and word stress (fixed or mobile). Several languages in the area have what is referred to by different traditions as pitch accents, tones or syllable accents, or intonations.

Język, literatura, muzyka

International audience; In this demo presentation, we discuss tools and techniques developed within Borderland: a project dedicated to the analysis of paralin-guistic phenomena in the conversations of Polish and German teenagers, entitled: Language of Boundaries and Boundaries of Language (see more at: http://borderland.amu.edu.pl/).

Intonation is often considered the most problematic component of prosody. It may largely contribute to the meaning of an utterance and provide rich indexical information. The complexity of the intonationrelated phenomena, from the acoustic level up to the cognitive process of semiosis, resulted in a variety of conceptualisations and divergent theoretical approaches. In the present text, an attempt is made to sketch the late Wiktor Jassem’s contribution to intonation studies, starting from his early work on colloquial British English to the studies focused on the Polish language as well as his general perspective on prosody and on the methods of its exploration. Some of his unpublished contribution to research projects on various aspects of prosody is also acknowledged. The present overview is based both on available written materials (publications, references, reports, reviews) and the author’s personal communication with Wiktor Jassem and his collaborators.

Aspects of gestural alignment in task-oriented dialoguesInterlocutors in a conversation influence each other in a number of dimensions. This process may lead to observable changes in their communicative behaviour. The directions and profiles of these changes are often correlated with the quality of interaction and may predict its success. In the present study, the gestural component of communication is scrutinised for changes that may reflect the process of alignment. Two types of task-oriented dialogues between teenagers are recorded and annotated for gestures and their features. We hypothesize that the dialogue task type (collaborative vs. competitive), as well as certain culture-specific properties of alignment that differ between German and Polish pairs, may significantly influence the process of communication. In order to explore the data and detect tendencies in gestural behaviour, automatised annotation mining and statistical exploration have been used, including a moving frame approach aimed at the investigation of co-occurring strokes as well as re-occurring strokes and their features. Significant differences between German and Polish speakers, as well as between the two dialogue types, have been found in the number of gestures, stroke duration and amplitude. Aspekty wzajemnego dopasowania gestykulacji w dialogach zadaniowychUczestnicy konwersacji wpływają na siebie wzajemnie w wielu różnych wymiarach. Proces ten może prowadzić do obserwowalnych zmian w ich zachowaniach komunikacyjnych. Kierunek i charakter tych zmian często wiążą się z jakością interakcji i mogą pozwolić przewidzieć jej sukces. Celem niniejszego badania jest eksploracja gestowego składnika komunikacji pod kątem zjawisk, które mogą odzwierciedlać zjawisko wzajemnego dopasowania uczestników. Zarejestrowano dwa typy dialogów zadaniowych z udziałem nastolatków. Nagrania anotowano pod kątem gestów i ich cech. W badaniu postawiono hipotezę, iż typ zadania dialogowego (ukierunkowane na współpracę vs. na konkurencję), jak również pewne specyficzne cechy kulturowe dopasowania komunikacyjnego, które różnicują polskie i niemieckie pary rozmówców, mogą oddziaływać na proces komunikacji. W celu eksploracji danych oraz wykrycia tendencji cechujących zachowania gestowe, wykorzystano zautomatyzowane metody analizy anotacji oraz techniki statystyczne. Uwzględniono podejście oparte na ruchomych oknach czasowych, umożliwiające analizę współwystępowania jak i powtarzania gestów właściwych i ich właściwości. Wykazano istotne różnice między rozmówcami polskimi i niemieckimi oraz między typami zadań dialogowych w zakresie liczby gestów, czasu trwania oraz amplitudy gestu właściwego.

In the present text, some recent changes in the perspective taken by psycholinguists in the study of language and communication are discussed. T heir interests seem to gradually shift from the study of language processing as an isolated and independent phenomenon towards inclusion of more interactional factors being indispensable components of interpersonal communication and involved in the process of communicative alignment. Alignment is here understood as a complex phenomenon that goes beyond increasing similarity of mental representations and related communicative behaviour. It simultaneously occurs on many levels and in various modalities, including those traditionally excluded from language study. A s a consequence, it implies not only more flexibility in the study of interpersonal communication but it also means a shift in the psycholinguistic methodology and probably also in the widely accepted picture of language and its limits.

According to contemporary opinion emotional reactions to syntactic violations are due to surprise as a result of the general mechanism of prediction. The classic view is that, the processing of musical syntax can be explained by activity of the cerebral cortex. However, some recent studies have indicated that subcortical brain structures, including those related to the processing of emotions, are also important during the processing of syntax. In order to check whether emotional reactions play a role in the processing of pitch syntax or are only the result of the general mechanism of prediction, the comparison of skin conductance levels reacting to three types of melodies were recorded. In this study, 28 subjects listened to three types of short melodies prepared in Musical Instrument Digital Interface Standard files (MIDI) – tonally correct, tonally violated (with one out-of-key – i.e., of high information content), and tonally correct but with one note played in a different timbre. The BioSemi ActiveTwo with two passive Nihon Kohden electrodes was used. Skin conductance levels were positively correlated with the presented stimuli (timbral changes and tonal violations). Although changes in skin conductance levels were also observed in response to the change in timbre, the reactions to tonal violations were significantly stronger. Therefore, despite the fact that timbral change is at least as equally unexpected as an out-of-key note, the processing of pitch syntax mainly generates increased activation of the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system. These results suggest that the cortico–subcortical loops (especially the anterior cingulate – limbic loop) may play an important role in the processing of musical syntax.

This paper introduces “Paralingua” - a new speech corpus created within a larger ongoing project whose primary aim was to develop a speaker recognition and identification system for forensics. The present corpus was designed for the purpose of analysis of selected paralinguistic features in continuous speech and for preliminary examination of the vocal display of affective states. The recorded (and annotated) data include conversational speech in the form of task-oriented dialogues, emotional utterances (realized as emotion portrayals), and an acted court scene. As a reference material, a short read text was provided by each of the speakers.

Filled pauses (FPs) have proved to be more than valuable cues to speech production processes and important units in discourse analysis. Some aspects of their form and occurrence patterns have been shown to be speaker- and language-specific. In the present study, basic acoustic properties of FPs in Polish task-oriented dialogues are explored. A set of FPs was extracted from a corpus of twenty task- oriented dialogues on the basis of available annotations. After initial scrutiny and selection, a subset of the signals underwent a series of pitch, formant frequency and voice quality analyses. A significant amount of variation found in the realisations of FPs justifies their potential application in speaker recognition systems. Regular monosegmental FPs were confirmed to show relatively stable basic acoustic parameters, which allows for their easy identification and measurements but it may result in less significant differences among the speakers.

Ile jest dzisiaj języków na świecie? Liczba podana w naszej książce może być zaskakująca, zwłaszcza, że jest ona kilkunastokrotnie wyższa niż liczba państw na świecie. Języki również cały czas powstają – czy to za sprawą indywidualnego rozwoju dialektów danego języka czy też mieszania się różnych języków w społeczeństwach wielojęzycznych. Niestety, języki o wiele częściej zanikają niż powstają, co powoduje, że ogólna liczba języków wcale nie wzrasta, a wręcz dramatycznie maleje. Trudno przewidzieć, ile języków będzie nadal używanych za kilkanaście - kilkadziesiąt lat, jednak wstępne prognozy są pesymistyczne: połowa z obecnie używanych języków umrze. Nasze języki są w niebezpieczeństwie i nie jest to sprawa, którą interesują się wyłącznie językoznawcy. Różnorodność językowa to część różnorodności kulturowej, która cechuje człowieczeństwo – i jest ona skarbem, a nie ciężarem. Z pomocą tej książki dowiesz się, co niesie ze sobą ten skarb: fascynujący świat języków.

The One is the identity of Transcendens-Immanens. Far (external) as Transcendens, It becomes close (internal) as Immanens. This closeness entitles us to try to express the One. Reason, will and - involving both, in sacrum area - faith can testify of the One. It is previous to every philosophical discourse, which is asking about the principle of universe (arche). The One is previously given and - at least implicite - present in discourse. It is also, exactly as arche, the completion of this discourse. In the philosophy, which starts from and completes on the One, we can see the structural conflict between dualistic form of principium rationis and the trend to unity. However, this conflict seems to be the strength of the philosophy, when it assumes the positive shape of balance between rationality and extrarationality (existence). The One cannot be comprehended in rational way, because principium rationis invariably imposes to consider the One in contrast to multiplicity. „The One” in such understanding is not Transcendens (-Immanens), while entangled in dualism. Only in the symbiosis of rational and existential orders (thanks to mentioned balance) the One can overcome the rational determinateness. Then It reveals itself in eschatological dimension as Deity; the philosophical space becomes the religious space. Mystical experience takes place of meditation, becoming a kernel of faith - ultimate care. The commonness of ultimate care experience, which is known by every man, tends to stand for mystical egalitarianism, which means recognition of mystical state as the experience inherent connected with the human fate. As an expression of Transcendens-Immanens, the One calms. The One is a password (word o f passing) ciphering arche of philosophy and Deity of religion. Reading of this cipher requires the cooperation of reason and existence - thinking and participation.

In the present paper, selected problems related to the annotation of the DiaGest corpus are discussed. A system of dialogue acts is proposed along with a conceptual framework that allows for independent labelling of the contributions provided by various modalities and channels. Both auditory and visual modalities are considered. Four channels are defined as major ways of providing quasi-independent modal contributions. A four-dimensional categorisation of dialogue acts is proposed. It includes a separate dimension for attitude-related tags. Dialogue acts are conceptualised as multidimensional entities built on the basis of modal contributions provided by respective channels.

In the present study, selected properties of multimodal instructing acts are discussed. Realisations of the instructing acts extracted from a corpus of task-oriented dialogues are analysed in terms of their syntactic structure, prosodic properties and accompanying gestures. The syntactic structures found in the material are similar to those found in earlier studies on map task dialogues. Deictic vocabulary is more frequent in gesture-supported instructions. The mean relative pitch range is similar to the values obtained for instructions in earlier studies and different from the values for syntactically similar questions. As opposite to verbally ill-formed instructions, the well-formed ones tend to contain at least one gestural stroke. It is shown that the relative range of pitch frequency is higher in the gesture-accompanied instructing acts. It is also noticed that prosody and gesture may play similar roles in utterances.

In the present paper, the intonational realization of Request Action dialogue acts in Polish map task dialogues is analyzed. The study is focused on the Request External Action acts realized as single, well-formed intonational phrases. Basic pitch-related parameters are measured and discussed. Nuclear melodies are described and categorized, and some generalizations are formulated about their common realizations. Certain aspects of the grammatical form and phrase placement in the dialogue flow are also taken into account. The results will be employed in comparative studies and in the preparation of glottodidactic materials, but they may also prove useful in the field of speech synthesis or recognition.

In this text, an analysis of the lexical material obtained from the recordings of Polish task-oriented dialogues is presented. Some findings regarding quasi- and non-lexical units are also mentioned. The dialogue task involved the reconstruction of a figure made of paper. It was carried out in two settings: Mutual visibility and limited visibility. The analyses of the vocabulary are focused on finding its specific features and the differences between the structures of the vocabularies of instruction givers and instruction followers in the two settings. Frequency lists as well as most frequent bigrams extracted from the material are discussed in terms of their relatedness to the settings, the roles of the speakers and some other factors.

In the present paper, the experimental procedure, the details of sound and video recording set-up as well as the system for speech and gesture transciption and coding used in the Polish Cartoon Narration Corpus (PCNC) project are described. The audio-visual data come from a cartoon narration task performed by both children and adults. The recordings are transcribed orthographically and phonemically, and labelled for selected phenomena on a number of levels, including gesture, lexicon, prosody, and dialogue acts.

International audience; The tonal accent (TA) of Somali undergoes many variations that remain understudied and poorly understood. This paper investigates two of the most important of these variations, which both imply the pitch lowering of the TA. The first lowering involves the last TA of a subject NP. Specifically, the high tone of the TA (H*) becomes mid (M) or low (L) and has been analyzed as resulting from the de-accentuation of the word. The other lowering has been described as the general process whereby a H or M tone is realized at the next tone level below (H->M, M->L), just before a pause. This paper argues that both pitch lowerings result from the interaction between the H* and a L tone associated with a prosodic constituent. In subject case, the L tone is assumed to be a tonal morpheme that is associated with the phonological phrase and delinks the last H* in a subject NP. In a pre-pausal context, the L tone is a boundary tone associated with higher constituents and only has a local lowering effect on the last mora of those constituents.