This meta-analysis examined the contribution of prosodic sensitivity to reading comprehension, and characterized the pathways by which this contribution occurs and the factors affecting it. Using meta-regression with robust variance estimation to synthesize and quantify 53 papers comprising 62 studies on word reading (77 effect sizes, N = 6,043…

This conversation analytic study offers an empirical analysis of the Japanese turn-initial interjection "are." The interjectional "are" is said to be pragmatized from its use as a distal demonstrative and has been considered as an expression of a speaker's internal state of being surprised at something. In contrast, this study…

In this dissertation, I investigate how people navigate ambiguity in everyday speech, with a focus on quantifier-negation sentences. Combining corpus analysis, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling in the Rational Speech Act framework, I explore preferred interpretations of quantifier-negation and examine the contexts and prosodies…

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…

The Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP) is widely used in infant research. Previous studies have shown that speech perception measures obtained with HPP are related to later language skills which may make them a potential instrument for an early detection of developmental language risks. The present study assessed the reliability and stability of…

The study used naturalistic data on the production of nominal prefixes in the Otopamean language Northern Pame (autonym: Xi'iuy) to test Whole Word (constructivist) and Minimal Word (prosodic) theories for the acquisition of inflection. Whole Word theories assume that children store words in their entirety; Minimal Word theories assume that…

Purpose: Reduced stress commonly occurs in talkers with Parkinson's disease (PD), whereas excessive and equal stress is frequently associated with dysarthria of talkers with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and multiple sclerosis (MS). This study sought to identify articulatory impairment patterns that underlie these two impaired stress…

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…

A key characteristic of individuals with autism is communicative dysfunction. Specifically identifying the appropriate use of pragmatic skills such as phrasing and syntax. When looking at expressing phrasing (producing of word groups), communication research has highlighted a significant group difference between students with autism and typically…

In this article, I systematically review evidence on the relations between oral reading fluency (ORF) and reading comprehension (RC) for adolescents with limited reading proficiency (ALRP) in Grades 6 to12. I organized findings from 23 studies into five themes: (a) unclear role of ORF in the simple view of reading model for ALRP, (b) ALRP have…

It is shown that a particular class of pauses taken in both read and composed speech obey allometric laws such that mean pause length predicts body size. The pauses in this class have durations that roughly span 250 ms to 1,000 ms and are taken to mark grammatical and prosodic boundaries. A theory of pause allometry is developed based on the…

Classic typologies within prosody tend to treat 'tone' languages as being diametrically opposed to 'stress' languages. However, Hyman (2006) highlights several languages that can have both, including Seneca, Fasu, and Copala Trique. As language documentation advances and our acoustic methodologies in the field are further refined, we have seen…

In this study, we propose a hypothesis that domain-general auditory processing, a perceptual anchor of L1 acquisition, can serve as the foundation of successful post-pubertal L2 learning. This hypothesis was tested with 139 post-pubertal L2 immersion learners by linking individual differences in auditory discrimination across multiple acoustic…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also…

Auditory speech discrimination is essential for normal language development. Children born preterm are at greater risk of language developmental delays. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy at term-equivalent age, the present study investigated early discrimination of speech prosody in 62 neonates born between week 23 and 41 of gestational…