One feature of Spanish that presents some difficulties to second language (L2) learners whose first language (L1) is English concerns lexical stress. This study explores one aspect of the obstacle these learners face, weak phonological processing routines concerning stress inherited from their native language. Participants were L1 English L2…

The aim of this study was to illuminate the relationships between the three components of oral reading fluency, sustained attention, working memory, and text comprehension in typically developing third-grade students (N = 140). The findings of hierarchical regression analysis reveal that speed, accuracy, and prosody together significantly…

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

Research on language learners' attention suggests that manipulating attention is beneficial in the language learning process as it facilitates the "noticing" of specific linguistic aspects. The current study investigated the effects of directing learners' attention to segments and prosody in English phonetic training. Korean learners of…

The conclusions on prosodic pitch features in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have primarily been derived from studies in non-tonal language speakers. This cross-linguistic study evaluated the performance of imitating Cantonese lexical tones and their non-linguistic (nonspeech) counterparts by Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking children with and…

This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in light of sex differences in the pace of language development. Fifty-three 3- to 5-year-old boys and girls learned pairs of novel words with contrasting…

The current study examined the phonolexical processing of Mandarin segments and tones by English speakers at different Mandarin proficiency levels. Eleven English speakers naive to Mandarin, 15 intermediate and 9 advanced second language (L2) learners participated in a word-learning experiment. After learning the sound and meaning of 16 Mandarin…

Purpose: ?he lexical stress pattern (trochaic vs. iambic) may affect various aspects of word learning and word production in children with cochlear implants (CIs). This study aimed to investigate lexical stress effects in word learning by Greek-speaking children with CIs. Method: A word learning paradigm, consisting of a word production and a word…

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…

In this study, 118 native speakers of Japanese watched 48 separate video clips in which a teacher provided recasts on phonological or lexical errors to students in Portuguese, a language with which the participants were unfamiliar. In the video clips, six recast characteristics were manipulated: length, segmentation (segmented/whole), prosodic…

This study explores collaborative and individual computer-assisted prosody training (CAPT) through a quasi-experimental design. Eighteen adult Algerian EFL learners were recruited and randomly assigned into a control group receiving no treatment and two experimental groups, a collaborative CAPT group where the participants practiced in pairs, and…

Background: Prosodic reading is one of the steps needed to achieve reading fluency. It is already known that English children develop their reading prosody from the earliest grades of primary school, showing the greatest improvement between first and second grade, but there are no Spanish studies of the development of reading prosody in the first…

Purpose: The relationship between short-term memory for phonology and pitch was explored by examining accuracy scores for typically developing children for 5 experimental tasks: immediate nonword repetition (NWR), nonword repetition with an 8-s silent interference (NWRS), pitch discrimination (PD), pitch discrimination with an 8-s silent…

Purpose: Polysyllables, words of 3 or more syllables, represent almost 30% of words used in American English. The purpose of this tutorial is to support speech-language pathologists' (SLPs') assessment and analysis of polysyllables, extending the focus of published assessment tools that focus on sampling and analyzing children's segmental accuracy…

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…