Phonetic and functional aspects of speech laughter: towards an expressive cognitive phonology

Taking speech laughter as an example, an approach towards cognitive phonology is sketched. Data from the Scottish Corpus was compared to earlier findings from spoken German. Both used pitch contours to express speech laughter, but several other mechanisms, including amplitude variation and vowel lengthening, were found in the Scots data. There was a relationship between the form and function of speech laughter, and substantial individual variation in the repertoire of forms employed by speakers.