Holding gestures across turns

An Investigation of Pitch Matching Across Adjacent Turns in a Corpus of Spontaneous German

Speakers in conversations may adapt their turn pitch relative to that of preceding turns to signal alignment with their interlocutor. However, the reference frame for pitch matching across turns is still unclear. Researchers studying pitch in the context of conversation have argued for an initializing approach, in which turn pitch must be judged relative to pitch in preceding turns. However, pe...

Pitch contour matching and interactional alignment across turns: an acoustic investigation.

In order to explore the influence of context on the phonetic design of talk-in-interaction, we investigated the pitch characteristics of short turns (insertions) that are produced by one speaker between turns from another speaker. We investigated the hypothesis that the speaker of the insertion designs her turn as a pitch match to the prior turn in order to align with the previous speaker's age...

Mate choice turns cognitive.

Evolutionary psychology has revolutionized research on human mate choice and sexual attraction in recent years, combining a rigorous Darwinian framework based on sexual selection theory with a loosely cognitivist orientation to task analysis and mechanism modelling. This hard Darwinian, soft computational approach has been most successful at revealing the adaptive logic behind physical beauty, ...

Stroke turns 40.

Crumbs turns the corner

rumbs (Crb) helps flies distinguish apical from basal in their epithelia. Now two new studies show that it is required for cell expansion independently of its specification of apical polarity. During cell expansion, the apical domain of photoreceptors elongates perpendicular to the apical–basal axis so that the domain can extend from the top to the bottom of the fly eye. The process may be cons...