Infant-directed speech (IDS) is characterized by a range of register-typical characteristics. Many of those can be objectively measured, such as acoustic-prosodic and structural-linguistic modifications. Perceived vocal affect, however, is a socio-emotional IDS characteristic and is subjectively assessed. Vocal affect goes beyond acoustic-prosodic…

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If…

This study addresses whether there is anything special about learning a third language, as compared to learning a second language, that results solely from the order of acquisition. We use a computational model based on the mathematical framework of Linear Discriminative Learning to explore this question for the acquisition of a small trilingual…

Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

This article reports on two experiments that examine the computation of contrastive focus in Russian on the part of adult English-dominant heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian, in comparison with baseline monolinguals. The first experiment uses an acceptability judgment task to determine whether bilingual and monolingual…

Background: Acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) involves speech-production deficits on both the segmental and suprasegmental levels. Recent research has identified a non-linear interaction between the metrical structure of bisyllabic words and word-production accuracy in German speakers with AOS, with trochaic words (strong-weak stress) being…

Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

This dissertation presents three studies that examined issues related to the production and the perception of pitch in a tone language. The first study examined linguistic contexts that may modulate consonant-induced pitch perturbations (CF0) in a tone language. Previous studies have produced mixed findings regarding the role of linguistic…

The high-variability training paradigm (multiple words, phonetic contexts, and talkers) has been successful for perceptual learning of tone contrasts. Here, it is extended to training native English listeners on Tokyo Japanese pitch-accent contrasts. Participants had no previous experience with lexically contrastive pitch patterns. They learned to…

Background: This study examined the development of stress sensitivity and its relationship with word reading. Previous research has rarely measured phoneme and stress sensitivity in the same task, making a direct comparison of the contribution between the two in reading development difficult. Methods: Participants were native English-speaking…

This study examined whether social bias manipulation can influence how naïve multiage listeners evaluate second language (L2) speech. Sixty native English-speaking listeners (Montreal residents) rated audio recordings of 40 Quebec French speakers of L2 English for five dimensions of oral performance (accentedness, comprehensibility, segmental…

The present study investigated first language (L1) and second language (L2) Chinese categorization of tones and segments and use of tones and segments in lexical access. Previous research has shown that English listeners rely more on pitch height than pitch direction when perceiving lexical tones; however, it remains unclear if this superior use…

Spoken English has a stress-alternating rhythm that is not marked in its orthography. In two experiments, the authors evaluated whether stylistic alterations to print that marked stress pulses fostered the rendering of rhythm (experiment 1) and stress (experiment 2) during silent reading. In experiment 1, silent readers rated the helpfulness of…

Background: Sentence repetition is gaining increasing attention as a source of information about children's sentence-level abilities in clinical assessment, and as a clinical marker of specific language impairment. However, it is widely debated what the task is testing and therefore how informative it is. Aims: (1) To evaluate the effects of…