A growing empirical research base has contributed substantially to our understanding of pronunciation instruction. A contemporary perspective entails a balanced approach featuring both the teaching of segmentals (vowels and consonants) and suprasegmentals (stress, rhythm, and intonation) while favoring intelligible (i.e. clear) pronunciation as…

Purpose: The purposes of this clinical focus article are to describe differences in expressive prosody among autistic individuals, describe the role of prosody in reading comprehension, highlight the potential contribution of prosody to the reading comprehension difficulties experienced by many autistic individuals, discuss interventions that…

Prosody is an important indicator of reading development, but many teachers are unclear about how it can help students improve their reading fluency. Beyond demonstrating expressive or flowing reading, specific components of "reading prosody" can distinctly reveal how well word recognition and comprehension processes coalesce, providing…

Autistic youth display difficulties in emotion recognition, yet little research has examined behavioral and neural indices of vocal emotion recognition (VER). The current study examines behavioral and event-related potential (N100, P200, Late Positive Potential [LPP]) indices of VER in autistic and non-autistic youth. Participants (N = 164)…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to explore the ability of Hebrew-speaking children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) to produce lexical stress. Method: A total of 36 children aged between 4 and 7 years, 18 children with CAS, and 18 typically developing (TD) children participated in the study. All children completed language and…

We examined the use of filled pauses in conversations between homogeneous pairs of autistic and non-autistic adults. A corpus of semi-spontaneous speech was used to analyse the rate, lexical type (nasal "uhm" or non-nasal "uh"), and prosodic realisation (rising, level or falling) of filled pauses. We used Bayesian modelling for…

Background: Down syndrome (DS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder of genetic origin with a cognitive-behavioural profile that distinguishes it from other syndromes. Within this profile, language difficulties are particularly marked, having been more studied in childhood than in adulthood. More generally, there is a paucity of research on the…

When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity,…

Purpose: This study examined how speakers adapt to fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) errors that affect the use of prosody to convey linguistic meaning, whether f[subscript o] adaptation in that context relates to adaptation in linguistically neutral sustained vowels, and whether cue trading is reflected in responses in the prosodic cues of…

The speech register that adults especially caregivers use when interacting with infants and toddlers, that is, infant-directed speech (IDS) or baby talk, has been reported to facilitate language development throughout the early years. However, the neural mechanisms as well as why IDS results in such a developmental faciliatory effect remain to be…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the ability to discriminate yes/no questions from statements in three groups of children--bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users, nontraditional CI users with aidable hearing preoperatively in the ear to be implanted, and controls with normal hearing. Half of the nontraditional CI users had…

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…

Purpose: Talkers adapt their speech according to the demands of their listeners and the communicative context, enhancing the properties of the signal (pitch, intensity) and/or properties of the code (enhancement of phonemic contrasts). This study asked how mothers adapt their child-directed speech (CDS) in ways that might serve the immediate goals…

Purpose: Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a motor speech disorder affecting articulatory planning and speech programming. When AOS is the sole manifestation of neurodegeneration, it is termed primary progressive apraxia of speech (PPAOS). Recent work has shown that there are distinct PPAOS subtypes: phonetic, prosodic, and those that do not clearly…