Greg Bryant: UCSC Dept. of Psychology

During speech communication, conversationalists produce and understand many simultaneous pieces of information through prosodic features of the voice (i.e., pitch, loudness, and duration properties). Prosodic variations provide cues to lexical and grammatical units (linguistic prosody), as well as emotional and intentional information (affective prosody). But prosody may also be used by conversationalists to signal social information not necessarily linked to the meaning of the words used. In this talk I will present various research examining prosody production and perception in both linguistic and social contexts. I will then discuss related ideas concerning linguistic and affective prosodic distinctions, functional dissociations in pitch production including potential laryngeal specializations, and evidence for pitch perception differences between tone and non-tone language speakers. I will argue that prosodic communication systems are functionally organized and future research should examine correspondences between production systems and perceptual response biases.