Purpose: The function of child-directed speech has been debated for decades. This study examined the perceptual and acoustic characteristics of child- and adult-directed Cantonese tones to test the hyperarticulation and prosodic hypotheses that have been proposed to account for the acoustic modifications in child-directed speech. Method: Sixty-two…

The ability to understand and convey one's thoughts and emotions through spoken language is important for successful communication. The prosody of spoken language, including the intonation, rhythm, and stress present in speech, is important for language acquisition, language comprehension, and communication (Mehler et al., 1988; Nazzi, Bertoncini,…

Noun-related morphosyntax has not been emphasized in the literature on children with specific language impairment (SLI), yet, across languages, problems in this area are quite apparent. This review is designed to highlight noun-related difficulties that seem to be especially troublesome for these children. A review of the research literature on…

This study investigates the perception and production of a specific type of metaphoric gesture that mimics melody in speech, also called "pitch gesture," in the learning of L2 suprasegmental features. In a between-subjects design, a total of 106 participants with no previous knowledge of Chinese were asked to observe (Experiment 1) and…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

High-stakes tasks may prevent language learners from performing successfully due to factors of "communicative stress" (Skehan, 1996, p. 52). Little research, however, has directly examined phonological patterns in learners' performances on low-stakes, medium-stakes, and high-stakes classroom tasks. The current study investigated the oral…

One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

This dissertation investigates the lexical f[subscript 0] control in Mandarin within the framework of Articulatory Phonology (AP) in two experiments: an imitation study (Experiment 1) and an Electromagnetic Articulography production study (Experiment 2). Empirical results are accounted for by making reference to a gestural model of f[subscript o]…

Convergent evidence suggests that syllables play a primary and distinctive role in the phonological phase of Mandarin Chinese word production. Specifically, syllables are selected before other phonological components and guide subsyllabic encoding. The proximity of phonological syllables to word representations in Chinese languages ensures that…

This study considers the role of L1 phonological influence in L2 English past tense morphology production by native speakers of Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese. While these L1s share similar phonological restrictions on consonant cluster formation needed for English past tense morphology, differences arise in L1 syntax (only Mandarin lacks…

This study examined pinyin (the official phonetic system that transcribes the lexical tones and pronunciation of Chinese characters) invented spelling and English invented spelling in 72 Mandarin-speaking 6th graders who learned English as their second language. The pinyin invented spelling task measured segmental-level awareness including…

Recent studies on the learning of L2 prosody have suggested that pitch gestures can enhance the learning of the L2 lexical tones. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of these gestures can aid the learning of L2 intonation, especially by tonal-language speakers. Sixty-four Mandarin speakers with basic-level Spanish were asked to learn three…

The main cause of pronunciation problems faced by EFL learners is their lack of a suprasegmental background. Most of those having oral comprehension and expression difficulties are unaware that their difficulty comes from their negligence of concepts of stress, pitch, juncture and linkers. While remedying stress problems, students should be taught…

This paper deals with the study of tone in languages that additionally have a phonological contrastive of quantity, such as vowel length or stress. In such complex word-prosodic systems, tone and the quantity contrast(s) can be fully independent of one another, or they may interact. Both of these configurations are illustrated in this paper, and…

This study examines the development of speech rhythm in second language (L2) learners of typologically different first languages (L1s) at different levels of proficiency. An empirical investigation of durational variation in L2 English productions by L1 Mandarin learners and L1 German learners compared to native control values in English and the…