Voice, as a secondary sexual characteristic, is known to affect the perceived attractiveness of human individuals. But the underlying mechanism of vocal attractiveness has remained unclear. Here, we presented human listeners with acoustically altered natural sentences and fully synthetic sentences with systematically manipulated pitch, formants and voice quality based on a principle of body size projection reported for animal calls and emotional human vocal expressions. The results show that male listeners preferred a female voice that signals a small body size, with relatively high pitch, wide formant dispersion and breathy voice, while female listeners preferred a male voice that signals a large body size with low pitch and narrow formant dispersion. Interestingly, however, male vocal attractiveness was also enhanced by breathiness, which presumably softened the aggressiveness associated with a large body size. These results, together with the additional finding that the same vocal dimensions also affect emotion judgment, indicate that humans still employ a vocal interaction strategy used in animal calls despite the development of complex language.

There is increasing evidence that many languages encode prosodic focus not only with phonetic variations in the focused component itself, but also with a reduction of pitch range and intensity of the post-focus components, a strategy known as post-focus compression (PFC). However, evidence is also emerging that in many other languages prosodic encoding of focus is markedly different, suggesting that PFC might be related to factors such as the presence of lexical tone, stress or the availability of morphosyntactic means of signaling focus. The current study investigated the production and perception of focus in Taiwanese, Taiwan Mandarin and Beijing Mandarin, three languages/dialects that are all tonal and that have similar morphosyntactic means for indicating focus. Results showed clear evidence of PFC in Beijing Mandarin but lack of it in Taiwanese and Taiwan Mandarin, suggesting that PFC is independent of the factors mentioned above. Most interestingly, Taiwan Mandarin seems to have lost PFC due to close contact with Taiwanese despite its effectiveness as demonstrated by the perceptual experiment. The new findings, taken together with other recent finding about prosodic focus, seem to suggest that PFC is a “hard-to-evolve” prosodic feature that may have a single historical origin. Thus there is a need for large scale experimental research to explore the cross-linguistic distribution of PFC, so as to broaden our understanding of not only prosodic typology, but also language contact, bilingualism and language evolution in general.

The prosodic realization of focus and its perception in Tibetan (Anduo dialect) were experimentally investigated. Using the question-and-answer paradigm, the speakers were asked to read aloud two target sentences in different focus conditions. Systematic acoustic analysis and statistical tests showed that, [1] On-focus F 0 was raised sharply in medial and final focus conditions, but not much in initial focus. In addition, post-focus compression (PFC) occurred in initial and medial focus conditions. [2] Duration lengthening was found (about 11%) in focused words, but not in pre-focus or post-focus words. [3] Intensity was increased significantly (about 1.2 dB) in on-focus words, and decreased in post-focus words (about 0.5 dB). [4] In perception, correct focus identification was near 80% for medial focus, 63.3% for final focus, but only about 40% for initial focus. Overall, except for initial focus, the production and perception of focus in Tibetan were similar to those in Mandarin and English.

This paper presents an overview of the Parallel Encoding and Target Approximation (PENTA) model of speech prosody, in response to an extensive critique by Arvaniti & Ladd (2009). PENTA is a framework for conceptually and computationally linking communicative meanings to fine-grained prosodic details, based on an articulatory-functional view of speech. Target Approximation simulates the articulatory realisation of underlying pitch targets – the prosodic primitives in the framework. Parallel Encoding provides an operational scheme that enables simultaneous encoding of multiple communicative functions. We also outline how PENTA can be computationally tested with a set of software tools. With the help of one of the tools, we offer a PENTA-based hypothetical account of the Greek intonational patterns reported by Arvaniti & Ladd, showing how it is possible to predict the prosodic shapes of an utterance based on the lexical and postlexical meanings it conveys.