Reviewed by Sabine Zerbian, University of the Witwatersrand

A collection of state-of-the-art articles on methodological questions in laboratory phonology, this book is the follow-up publication of a workshop held in Leipzig, Germany, in October 2004. Since the inception of laboratory phonology in the early 1990s, the methodology of prosodic research has become an issue in its own right. The contributors’ backgrounds reflect the anchoring of empirical prosody research at the interface of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and phonetics.

The contributors investigate three methodological areas: acoustic parameters, annotation practices, and experimental design. In the opening article ‘Acoustic segment durations in prosodic research: A practical guide’, Alice Turk, Satsuki Nakai, and Mariko Sugahara present a method for acoustic speech segmentation that is based on consonantal constriction and is suitable for duration measurements. In ‘Stylization of pitch contours’, Dik Hermes discusses methods that reduce pitch contours to their perceptually essential properties such as close-copy stylization, which contains only the minimum of tonal specification without audibly affecting the intonation, and a syllable-based method, which represents a tone for every syllable.

In ‘Voice source parameters and prosodic analysis’, Christophe d’Alessandro draws attention to voice quality, which is often neglected in the description of intonation. Although voice quality is phonemic in some languages and is important for naturalness in all languages, scholarly work often concentrates exclusively on fundamental frequency (F0) and duration. Greg Kochanski, ‘Prosody beyond fundamental frequency’, also stresses the importance of acoustic parameters beyond F0 and duration. He approaches this topic from a theoretical point of view, arguing that information channel intonation is exploited effectively by speakers. Klaus J. Kohler compares models of prosodic phonology in ‘Paradigms in experimental prosodic analysis: From measurement to function’. Drawing on data collected in various experiments, Kohler argues in favor of the contour-based approach of the Kiel Intonation Model rather than the prevalent tone sequence model of the autosegmental-metrical approach.

Stefan Baumann deals with the annotation of prosody with respect to information structure in ‘Information structure and prosody: Linguistic categories for spoken language annotation’. He describes the development of an annotation system based on the analysis of a corpus of German newspaper texts. In ‘Time types and time trees: Prosodic mining and alignment of temporally annotated data’, Dafydd Gibbon presents a methodology to derive hierarchical models of timing from annotated speech data.

The section on experimental design begins with an article by Fred Cummins, ‘Probing the dynamics of speech production’, which presents experimental designs that intervene in the speech production process, thereby reducing inter-speaker variability. These designs can be fruitfully applied in the investigation of rhythmic organization, phrasing, and pausing. In ‘Using interactive tasks to elicit natural dialogue’ Kiwako Ito and Shari R. Speer compare the naturalness of elicited data collected through scripted and spontaneous speech.

Duane G. Watson, Christine A. Gunlogson, and Michael K. Tanenhaus explore ‘Online methods for the investigation of prosody’. They present the use of eye-tracking in prosody research, taking the interpretation of H* and L+H* accents in English as an example. In ‘How to obtain and process perceptual judgements of intonational meaning’ Toni Rietveld and Aoju Chen evaluate existing scaling methods with respect to their suitability for perceptual judgments.

Carlos Gussenhoven discusses methods that distinguish between discrete and gradual differences in pitch contours in ‘Experimental approaches to establishing discreteness of intonational contrasts’. Finally, Katrin Schneider, Britta Lintfert, Grzegorz Dogil, and Bernd Möbius explore the ‘Phonetic grounding of prosodic categories’. They approach this question from the angle of speech production, perception, and acoustics.

The book also includes portraits of the authors, an author index, and a subject index.

This volume will be a useful reference for those working on experimental research in prosody, as it addresses a wide range of meta-theoretical questions.