We are happy to announce a talk by Alina Gregori in the Phonology Colloquium.
Room: IG 4.301
Date: Wednesday November 12th
Time: 16-18 ct.
Title: Individual strategies in multimodal hyperarticulation
Abstract:
Hyperarticulation refers to speakers adapting their articulation to the communicative needs of their interlocutor. Speakers enhance specific features to highlight certain elements or reduce others if the context allows (hypoarticulation). This has been found for acoustic features, and recently also for prosody-gesture interaction (Gregori & Kügler, under revision), licensed by focus and background contexts. These findings led to the conclusion that hyperarticulation is not a unimodal phenomenon but can be applied in multiple modalities. Following that finding, this study addresses whether individual speakers use hyperarticulation strategies similarly, if they prefer a strategy and if they combine them to highlight information in focus. Drawing on data from Gregori & Kügler (under revision), individual hyperarticulation is examined from a German conversational corpus.
Results reveal that multimodal hyperarticulation is more stable than prosodic hyperarticulation is, as the majority of participants use the multimodal strategy, and only half of them use the prosodic strategy. Importantly however, all participants use at least one strategy to hyperarticulate in focus, with the modality strategies compensating for each other if not both employ hyperarticulation. This reinforces the conclusion that hyperarticulation is a multimodal phenomenon and that both uni- and multimodal hyperarticulation strategies are needed to establish a comprehensive view on hyperarticulation in focus including individual strategies.