The aim of this chapter is to provide the state-of-the-art of the research on the development of suprasegmental phonology in bilingual children from infancy through childhood. First, we discuss word-level prosodic phenomena, with a special focus on the bilingual acquisition of word stress and syllable structure, which has been a lively area of research. We also present recent data on the acquisition of tone, which remains a less investigated topic. Second, we consider the acquisition of phrase-level prosody, namely, rhythm and intonation. For each domain of prosodic development, we briefly review monolingual patterns and discuss how learning two (or more) phonological systems can affect developmental trajectories, showing that there can be different cross-linguistic interactions such as transfer, delay, acceleration, or fusion. We also consider potential influencing factors that can trigger different tracks in the development of prosody, for example age of onset, amount of exposure, language dominance, and simultaneous or sequential language acquisition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of avenues for future research.

Over the last ten years, research on groups of infants and toddlers acquiring more than one language from birth has grown rapidly, though it still trails the research on infants learning just one language. This chapter discusses behavioural and neurophysiological findings about how bilinguals perceive spoken language in the first three years of life. This research demonstrates that bilingual and monolingual infants use similar core mechanisms to learn from differing linguistic input. Crucially, comparing their acquisition trajectories allows us to make inferences about the early linguistic representations of bilingual infants.

This chapter reviews the last twenty-five years of L2 prosody research in three sections, word stress, sentence intonation, and rhythm, and presents findings in relation to two underlying themes, form-meaning mapping and additive versus subtractive bilingual contexts. Concerning L2 stress, pioneering research framed perception difficulties either as an L1-to-L2 cue-transfer problem or as a processing deficit linked to learners’ inability to represent contrastive stress in their lexicons. Recent research established the extent and limits of those initial frames. L2 sentence intonation has multiple factors modeling its variation. One of them, social meaning, and in particular accommodation literature revealed the effect of affective factors which in multilingual communities became stronger than that of linguistic and social factors. As regards L2 rhythm, most research uses duration-based measures. Indeed, recent L1 studies started examining pitch-based rhythm measures which are still to be explored in L2. Ending with suggestions for future research that address those biases, this chapter aims at promoting a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of L2 prosody.

This chapter describes Clare’s attitude to form and surveys the various forms in which he writes. It emphasizes the variety of Clare’s formal achievement, showing how across his career he adopts different prosodic and generic conventions, including those of the sonnet, ballad, lyric, couplet, and ode. Running through all Clare’s poems, the chapter suggests, is a wariness of imposing excessive order upon the patterns of experience. The irregular beauty and emotional clarity of Clare’s poems emerge out of an effort to find a balance sympathetic to nature over artifice, spontaneity over control, and existing tradition over individual embellishment.

The author first defines the following notions of information structure: focus (vs. background), given (vs. new), and topic (vs. comment). He then goes on to show how these notions are reflected in the prosodic systems of Slavic languages. Focus in all Slavic languages is reflected in prosodic prominence governed by a stress-focus correspondence defined by the author. In general, ‘given’ is realized outside the sentence stress. Focus does not have an obligatory prosodic reflex in Slavic languages.

Slavic languages are notorious for rich inflectional systems, allowing substantial freedom in word order. Aside from SVO word order, canonical for the great majority of Slavic languages, orders with arguments surfacing in non-canonical positions are also allowed. We consider two such orders – OVS and OSV. The two orders stem from two different types of argument reordering with distinct syntactic, interpretive and prosodic properties. The first is linked to neutral prosody and is licenced by the object being construed as interpretively prominent compared to the subject. The object undergoing this type of reordering binds into the subject and takes scope over it. This reordering is possible only if the thematic prominence relations of arguments are identified by means other than their relative structural position. The second type is linked to marked prosody and is licenced by the displaced object being disambiguated as contrastive. In this type of reordering the object cannot bind into the subject or take scope over it. This type of reordering is possible only if the object carries a strong prosodic marker.

The chapter presents and discusses empirical data on the neuropsychology of gesture production. The focus of this chapter is on the specific contributions of the right and left hemispheres to the generation of gestures. Since the respective neuroscientific method has a substantial impact on the study results and different methodologies can even entail apparently opposing results concerning gesture production, different neuropsychological methods, their paradigms, and limitations are presented in detail. Spontaneous gesture production studies evidence a substantial contribution of the right hemisphere to gesture production, while gesture production on command studies show a relevant role of the left hemisphere. Gestures that are generated in association with right hemispheric functions such as spatial cognition, nonverbal emotional expression, global and metaphorical thinking appear to be generated in the right hemisphere, while gestures that are linked to tool use praxis are generated in the left hemisphere. The findings further provide a neuropsychological basis for understanding the complementarity but also the dissociation between gestural and verbal message.

We shed light on the question of how narrow information (F) and contrastive focus (CF) are intonationally and syntactically realized by heritage speakers (HSs) of Peninsular Spanish (PS) who have German as their second L1, and compare their data to those of monolingual speakers (MSs) of PS. Results from a production experiment show clear differences between the groups with respect to preferred syntactic strategies and, consequently, the intonational realization of focal pitch accents. The preferred strategy of HSs is stress shift, followed by p-movement and simple clefts, for both focus types. Conversely, MSs mostly use different strategies for each focus type; that is, pseudo-clefts and p-movement for F, and simple clefts and focus fronting for CF. Interestingly, stress shift is not a relevant option. The attested differences support the view that the interface between discourse on one hand, and syntax and phonology on the other, is challenging for bilingual speakers (Sorace, 2011).

We present an analysis of phrasal prosody, with an emphasis on focus-marking, for heritage speakers of Samoan in Aotearoa New Zealand. The analysis is based on recordings of four speakers doing a picture-description task designed to elicit different focus positions and types, from an earlier study of home country Samoan (Calhoun, 2015). All speakers showed features of phrasal prosody similar to those found for home country Samoan; however, there was considerable variation between speakers. We relate this to the language background of the speakers, and their attitudes and beliefs toward their heritage language. In particular, there were differences between generation 1.5 and 2 speakers, relating to their engagement with and beliefs about their university Samoan language classes. This shows the importance of these factors in the acquisition and maintenance of prosodic features, similar to other more-studied language features.

The relationship between context and prosody is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive ones in language. At the same time, it is one of the most difficult to describe because it is based on acoustic cues that only need milliseconds to create an image in our brain. However, speakers of a language can generally understand their interlocutors’ emotional and cognitive status through their prosodic realization. Prosodic pragmatics is the branch of pragmatics that attempts to identify the intentionality of the speaker’s meaning in a real context based on the analysis of the suprasegmental aspects of speech production. If prosody studies how an utterance is pronounced in unison with the perceptual features of pitch, length, and loudness, then prosodic pragmatics studies the acoustic and cognitive contextual parameters in conversation. The chapter will show the relationship between prosody, information, and context in communication. Starting from the essential acoustic parameters of speech, it will revise the most influential theories of intonation through the prosodic pragmatics lens to understand the cognitive adaptation of a message in a specific context.

The sound of people’s voices when speaking to others is sometimes a clue to their possible ironic intent. This chapter presents an overview of some of the specific vocal strategies employed when people express ironic meaning. Speakers signal their ironic intentions through local and global features of prosody, along with vocal impressions (e.g., spectral information that depicts a different person or imagined agent), laughter, and other nonverbal vocalizations. Experimental studies demonstrated that these vocal strategies are key indices for listeners when they infer that speakers convey irony, including sarcasm, through their talk. Bryant describes the evolutionary roots of these different vocalizations (e.g., the desire for play) and argues how vocal strategies are an important element in how people coordinate and cooperate during verbal interaction. He emphasizes that different vocal strategies are not fixed, but vary in different situations to create a wide range of contextually appropriate pragmatic messages that others may readily interpret.