This study examined the interrelationships among and combined effects of word reading skills and syntactic knowledge on reading prosody in fifth-grade monolingual Spanish-speaking students. We used Spanish standardized tests to assess the participants (n = 169, 79 girls) on word and pseudoword reading skills, syntactic knowledge, and reading…

Teaching for musical meaning can be a multifaceted topic, since a universally accepted definition of musical meaning is elusive; yet musical meaning remains at the heart of music literacy. Music literacy is equally complex, as changes in technology constantly reorganize how musical sounds are produced, recorded, and transmitted. Today, musical…

This study investigated the comprehension of prosodically and syntactically marked focus by 5- to 8-year-old Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children listened to question-answer dialogues while looking at pictures depicting the scenarios, and judged whether the answers were correct responses to the…

This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in…

Purpose: Pronouns are referentially ambiguous: For example, "she" could refer to any female. Nonetheless, errors in pronoun interpretation rarely occur for adults with typical development (TD) due to several strategies implicitly shared between the talker and listener. The purpose of this study was to test the impacts of syntactic,…

Languages tend to have three major clause types (declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives), dedicated to three main speech acts (assertions, questions, commands). However, the particular forms that these clause types take differ from language to language, and have to be learned. Previous experimental results suggest that by 18 months old,…

Pragmatics lies at the point where language meets the social world and encompasses both the linguistic and the social dimensions of communication. However, the relationship between pragmatic abilities, other language skills, and socio-cognitive aspects such as mentalizing is still a matter of wide debate. This study sets out to investigate the…

Recursive NPs are difficult to produce and late to emerge. We compare prosodic and syntactic abilities in Japanese-speaking five- and six-year-olds (n = 28) and adults (n = 10). It is reported that syntactic structure in Japanese is prosodically marked via downstep and metrical boost. Results of an elicited imitation task suggested that children…

The study examined storytelling prosody (i.e., prosodic variations in retelling a story) and the relation with oral language in Taiwanese preschool children. One hundred and twenty-eight preschool children aged 4 and 5 were recruited and given the following tasks: nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary, syntax, and storytelling prosody. Children's…

This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like…

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

In a language, certain phenomena are sensitive to specific prosodic domains. In a model of morphology-syntax-phonology interaction in which morphological and syntactic structure projects phonological domains belonging to a set hierarchy, each phonological process refers to a specific level of that hierarchy. Therefore, describing a phonological…

Word segmentation plays a crucial role in language acquisition, particularly for word learning and syntax development, and possibly predicts later language abilities. Previous studies have suggested that this ability develops differently across languages, possibly affected by the languages' rhythmic properties (Rhythmic Segmentation Hypothesis)…

It has been proposed that second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers in processing due to either influence from their native language or an inability to integrate information from multiple linguistic domains in a second language. To shed new light on the underlying mechanism of L2 processing, we used an event-related potentials…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…