Speech Prosody and Beyond: Exploring Interface Phenomena and Understudied Languages

This special issue brings together six papers exploring how speech prosody intersects with other linguistic, cognitive and social domains, with particular attention to methodological diversity and understudied languages. The collection addresses a range of complementary topics: the role of intonation in resolving lexical ambiguity in Korean; the perceived personality traits of synthetic versus natural voices; prosodic modifications children make in demanding communicative contexts; perceptual cues to lexical pitch accent discrimination in South Kyungsang Korean; rhythmic differences between Hadari and Bedouin Arabic dialects; and durational marking of lexical stress beyond the stressed syllable in Soikkola Ingrian and Ayutla Tlapanec. Collectively, these studies make valuable contributions to the empirical and theoretical foundations of prosody research. By combining diverse methods with a broad linguistic scope, the collection provides a basis for future research on how prosody interacts with other dimensions of language and communication.