Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as…

This article examines the constraints on Prosodic Word production in Spanish by three monolingual and three Spanish-German bilingual children from the beginning of word production until 2;2. It also considers the relationship between Prosodic Words and Phonological Phrases, and in the case of monosyllabic words, it takes into consideration…

In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that those errors in immediate serial recall (ISR) that are attributable to phonological confusability share a locus with segmental errors in normal speech production. In the first two experiments, speech errors were elicited in the repeated paced reading of six-letter lists. The errors mirrored the…

Ten 5-year-old children with adequate articulation skills and ten children (also 5 years old) with inadequate articulation skills were administered the Templin/Darley Test of Articulation and the Test of Rhythm and Intonation Patterns (TRIP) to compare the ability of the two groups to imitate suprasegmental patterns. (Author/PHR)

We investigate whether children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI) are also phonologically impaired and, if so, what the nature of that impairment is. We focus on the prosodic complexity of words, based on their syllabic and metrical (stress) structure, and investigate this using a novel non-word repetition procedure, the Test…

This study investigated the effects of association values and the influences of prosodic information on Japanese children's repetition of nonwords with varying association values and with or without pitch accent. Fifteen 3- and 4-year-olds (mean age = 4.42 years, range: 3.9-4.9) and nineteen 5- and 6-year-olds (mean age = 5.71 years, range:…

This paper presents a single-subject case study illustrating the need to closely examine effects of dialect from syllable position on l-colouring, and the effects of domain-initial strengthening in General American English. Most investigators report lighter /l/ tokens in syllable onsets and darker tokens in coda positions in isolated words. The…

This paper focuses on the development of Prosodic Word shapes in Catalan, a language which differs from both Spanish and English in the distribution of PW structures. Of particular interest are the truncations of initial unstressed syllables, and how these develop over time. Developmental qualitative and quantitative data from seven…

Within the field of second language acquisition, the acquisition of phonetics and phonology has generally taken a back seat to studies of morphological and syntactical acquisition. Although the lacuna is slowly being remedied by a growing interest in the phenomena of second language (L2) phonology, investigations into the acquisition of…

This paper begins by distinguishing phonology (the study of the systematic nature of the inter-relations of sounds in a language) from phonetics (the attempt to describe completely all the physical properties of an utterance). It is shown how in any language some properties of sounds are intuitively more relevant to the grammar and functioning of…

This paper analyzes linguistical features of Quiegolani Zapotec (QZ) via a combination of language-specific rules and universal constraints ordered within a constraint hierarchy that operates within a derivational phonology. A number of complex onset clusters in QZ do not follow the Sonority Sequencing Generalization discussed by J. Greenberg…

A purely segmental or suprasegmental analysis of vowel harmony in Arabic is inadequate because it leaves some questions unanswered. An approach based primarily on the metrical structure of the utterance and addressing an independent structural category, the "foot" of the word, that phonological rules may refer to, is preferred,…

The article discusses the tonal system of Lamnsok, a language spoken in the North-West province of the United Republic of Cameroun with specific reference to verbs. The tone pattern for a given clause is dependent on various factors handled at length. Charts and extensive examples accompany the text. (CLK)

This paper investigated the relationship of syntactic structure with prosodic and phonological information, focusing on distinctions between early and late closure sentences in terms both of intonational phrasing and of stress placement on stress shift items such as "Hong Kong." Contains 63 references. (MDM)

Although word stress has been hailed as a powerful speech-segmentation cue, the results of 5 cross-modal fragment priming experiments revealed limitations to stress-based segmentation. Specifically, the stress pattern of auditory primes failed to have any effect on the lexical decision latencies to related visual targets. A determining factor was…