PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The study investigates variation of two voice quality features (smoothed cepstral peak prominence and the relative strength of the fundamental) preceding speaker changes and turn holds in spontaneous conversations in Swedish and German. We demonstrate that the overall pattern is to a large extent linked to the syllabic structure in speech. While speech before turn holds is characterised by more periodic phonation than before speaker changes, the effect sizes are very small and are unlikely to be of practical importance for speech communication. We observe no evidence in favour of language specificity of the reported contrasts.