Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine whether suprasegmental speech perception contributes unique variance in predictions of reading decoding and comprehension for prelingually deaf children using two devices, at least one of which is a cochlear implant (CI). Method: A total of 104, 5- to 9-year-old CI recipients completed tests of…

The neuropsychological profile associated with sex chromosome trisomies (SCT) is frequently characterised by delays or deficits in linguistic development. Although maternal input could have an important role in influencing and shaping the linguistic development of children with SCT, there is a lack of studies in the literature that have…

We examined what causes L1-L2 differences in sensitivity to prominence cues in discourse processing. Participants listened to recorded stories in segment-by-segment fashion at their own pace. Each story established a pair of contrasting items, and one item from the pair was rementioned and manipulated to carry either a contrastive or…

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…

This study investigated whether individuals with high autistic traits rely on psychoacoustic abilities in affective prosody recognition (APR). In 94 college students, Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and psychoacoustic abilities were measured. Results indicated that higher AQ, higher rapid auditory processing (RAP), and maleness were associated with…

In this paper, I first provide a brief review of how scholars have conceptualized, tested, and elaborated aptitude frameworks relevant to second language (L2) speech learning. Subsequently, I introduce an emerging paradigm that assigns a fundamental role to domain-general auditory processing (i.e., having a good ear) in L1 speech acquisition and…

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…

This controlled experimental study investigated the interaction of variables associated with rating the pronunciation component of high-stakes English-language-speaking tests such as IELTS and TOEFL iBT. One hundred experienced raters who were all either familiar or unfamiliar with Brazilian-accented English or Papua New Guinean Tok Pisin-accented…

Purpose: Lexical stress and phoneme processes converge during phonological encoding, but the nature of the convergence has been debated. Stress patterns and phonemes may be integrated automatically and rigidly, resulting in a unified representation. Alternatively, stress and phoneme may be processed interactively based on sublexical contexts. The…

Purpose: This study aimed to obtain a comprehensive understanding about how Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) performed speech prosody in a connected discourse and to what extent their prosodic scenario differed from those normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method: Fifteen prelingually deaf Mandarin-speaking children with unilateral…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of nonmodal phonation on estimates of subglottal pressure (Ps) derived from the magnitude of a neck-surface accelerometer (ACC) signal and to confirm previous findings regarding the impact of vowel contexts and pitch levels in a larger cohort of participants. Method: Twenty-six vocally…

This study investigates the effects of prosodic sensitivity on reading. Highly capable adult musicians (i.e., persons with potentially excellent prosodic skills) and non-musicians were compared in terms of prosodic sensitivity and reading. Furthermore, the study examines possible reciprocal effects of prosodic sensitivity and reading. Sixty native…

This paper investigates whether typical stress patterns in English nouns and verbs are available as a prosodic cue for categorisation and accelerated word learning during first language acquisition. The stress typicality hypothesis states that left-stressed nouns and right-stressed verbs should be acquired earlier than the reverse configurations…

Echo phonology was originally proposed to account for obligatory coordination of manual and mouth articulations observed in several sign languages. However, previous research into the phenomenon lacks clear criteria for which components of movement can or must be copied when the articulators are so different. Nor is there discussion of which…

This study explores how young children infer nuances in epistemic modality through prosody. A forced-choice task was used, testing children's (ages three to seven) comprehension of the "might"/"will" distinction (modal condition) as well their ability to modulate the strength of "might" through two prosodic tunes…