A 4-stage developmental model, in which auditory sensitivity is fully mediated by speech perception at both the segmental and suprasegmental levels, which are further related to word reading through their associations with phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, verbal short-term memory and morphological awareness, was tested with…

The current study examined how form-focused instruction (FFI) with and without corrective feedback (CF) as output enhancement facilitated second language (L2) perception of Mandarin tones at both the phonetic and phonological levels by 41 Cantonese learners of Mandarin. Two experimental groups, FFI only and FFI-CF, received a 90-min FFI treatment…

Introduction: The perception of syllable stress has not been widely studied in developmental dyslexia, despite strong evidence for auditory rhythmic perceptual difficulties. Here we investigate the hypothesis that perception of sound rise time is related to the perception of syllable stress in adults with developmental dyslexia. Methods: A…

We assessed the relationship between brain structure and function in 10 individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), compared to six unaffected siblings, and 16 unrelated control participants with typical language. Voxel-based morphometry indicated that grey matter in the SLI group, relative to controls, was increased in the left inferior…

This study validated a video game paradigm to explore attention to prosodic and linguistic components of spoken sentences in nine moderate-to-low functioning children with autism and impaired verbal skills. Nine typically developing children were also included. The children listened to pre-recorded sentences varying with respect to content (e.g.,…

Considering the contradictory research on explicit teaching of suprasegmentals, the present study aims to investigate the effects of explicit instruction of L2 English learners' perception of prosodically ambiguous intonation patterns, as well as the possible effects of reported musical familiarity on intonation acquisition. A control group and a…

This study investigated suprasegmental variables of syllable stress and intonation contours in contextual speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC) by inexperienced signers. Ten hearing inexperienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech-alone (SA) conditions speaking a set of sentences containing stressed versus…

Linguists generally acknowledge that there exists an inevitable inter-relationship between different levels of linguistic analysis--phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Various linguistic labels are used to describe such a link. In particular, there exists a bridge between the phonology and morphology of particular languages.…

This study is based on Second Language Acquisition through blended learning and explores the application of new educational technologies in the development of distance education. In particular, the paper focuses on ways to enhance oral, aural, and intercultural skills through learners' engagement, develop authentic social interaction and…

My dissertation undertakes a complete study of the stress patterns, syntactic construction, and rhetorical style of hypermetric verse in Germanic alliterative poetry. This project allows me to fill a gap in the study of Germanic meter while simultaneously investigating the connection between metrical and literary scholarship. Hypermetric meter…

This study investigates prosodic (noun length) and lexical-semantic (animacy) influences on determiner use in the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch. In support of typological and language-specific hypotheses from the Germanic-Romance contrast, an advantage of monosyllabic nouns and of inanimate nouns…

Learning to read can pose a major challenge to students, and much of this challenge is due to the fact that written language is necessarily impoverished when compared to the rich, continuous speech signal. Prosodic elements of language are scarcely represented in written text, and while oral reading prosody has been addressed in the literature…

The present study explored how average- and high-skilled second-grade readers (as identified by their Woodcock-Johnson III Test of Academic Achievement Broad Reading scores) differed on behavioral measures of reading related to comprehension: eye movements during silent reading and prosody during oral reading. Results from silent reading implicate…

While visual signals that accompany spoken language serve to augment the communicative message, the same visual ingredients form the substance of the linguistic system in sign languages. This article provides an analysis of visual signals that comprise part of the intonational system of a sign language. The system is conveyed mainly by particular…

This article reports on an investigation of echolalic repetition in Alzheimer's disease (AD). A qualitative analysis of data from spontaneous conversations with MHI, a woman with AD, is presented. The data come from the DALI Corpus, a corpus of spontaneous conversations involving subjects with AD. This study argues that echolalic effects can be…