The Possible Word Constraint, or PWC, is a speech segmentation principle prohibiting to postulate word boundaries if a remaining segment contains only consonants. The PWC was initially formulated for English where all words contain a vowel and claimed to hold universally after being confirmed for various other languages. However, it is crucial to…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to use prosodic and syllable-structure variation to probe the underlying representation of laryngeal kinematics in languages traditionally considered to differ in voicing typology (German vs. Dutch and French). Method: Transillumination and videofiberendoscopic filming were used to investigate the devoicing…

Prosody is a linguistic feature in spoken English that is complex yet plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, many EFL pronunciation classes in Thailand have not adequately emphasized the importance and functions of prosody to learners. This research study aims to investigate effect of an oral fluency instructional method…

The study aims to investigate differences and similarities of two synonymous nouns, chance and opportunity. The sources of data were from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and online dictionaries. The study applied both quantitative and qualitative methodology. Throughout the five text types of COCA (i.e. spoken, fiction, popular…

This study investigates the pitch properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) specific to word-learning contexts in which mothers introduce unfamiliar words to children. Using a semi-spontaneous story-book telling task, we examined (1) whether mothers made distinctions between unfamiliar and familiar words with pitch in IDS compared to…

Perceptual grouping is fundamental to many auditory processes. The Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL) is a default grouping strategy, where rhythmic alternations of duration are perceived iambically (weak-strong), while alternations of intensity are perceived trochaically (strong-weak). Some argue that the ITL is experience dependent. For instance, French…

We examined the independent contributions of prosodic sensitivity and morphological awareness to word reading, text reading accuracy, and reading comprehension. We did so in a longitudinal study of English-speaking children (N = 70). At 5-7 years of age, children completed the metalinguistic measures along with control measures of phonological…

In this study, we introduce new insights into prosodic analyses as an emerging method to study what happens in classrooms interactions. We claim that the prosodic aspects (features of speech such as intonation, volume and pace) of talk are important, but under-represented in the learning sciences. These prosodic aspects may be used to complement,…

This paper examines the intonation of English statements and questions produced by Vietnamese speakers at two differing levels of proficiency. The goal of the study is three-fold: (1) analysing the final tunes and the prosodic structure observed in information-seeking questions, namely Yes-No question, Or-question, Tag-question and Wh-question,…

We report on three experiments that aim at measuring the role of prosody in the acceptability and interpretation of discourse relations between utterances connected by two French discourse markers, viz. "et" "and" and "alors" "then/well." These two discourse markers are highly polyfunctional: "et"…

This exploratory study fills the gap in research on using print board games to teach English prosody to advanced EFL learners at university level. We developed three in-class print-and-play board games that accompanied three prosody-related topics in a course in English phonetics and phonology at a Polish university. For those topics, compared to…

The intelligibility of everyday speech is built on the mastery and the use of appropriate intonation patterns. This makes intonation the music of everyday speech of which its appropriate use has been the final hurdle that the majority of the speakers of English as a Second Language have not crossed. This paper investigated the intonation patterns…

The perception and production of emotional and linguistic (focus) prosody were compared in children with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) peers. Thirteen CI and thirteen hearing-age-matched school-aged NH children were tested, as baseline, on non-verbal emotion understanding, non-word repetition, and stimulus identification and…

What determines consonant doubling in English? This question is pursued by using a large lexical database to establish systematic correlations between spelling, phonology and morphology. The main insights are: Consonant doubling is most regular at morpheme boundaries. It can be described in graphemic terms alone, i.e. without reference to…

Recent experiments have shown that people iconically modulate their prosody corresponding with the meaning of their utterance (e.g., Shintel et al., 2006). This article reports findings from a story reading task that expands the investigation of iconic prosody to abstract meanings in addition to concrete ones. Participants read stories that…