This conversation analytic study offers an empirical analysis of the Japanese turn-initial interjection "are." The interjectional "are" is said to be pragmatized from its use as a distal demonstrative and has been considered as an expression of a speaker's internal state of being surprised at something. In contrast, this study…

Background: Maternal input plays an important role in influencing linguistic development during the first years of life, and it is evident that mothers adapt their language according to their child's characteristics. Recently, it was demonstrated that maternal input addressed to children with sex chromosome trisomies (SCTs) at 8 months of age is…

In this dissertation, I investigate how people navigate ambiguity in everyday speech, with a focus on quantifier-negation sentences. Combining corpus analysis, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling in the Rational Speech Act framework, I explore preferred interpretations of quantifier-negation and examine the contexts and prosodies…

This article describes a simple method to teach pitch, a feature common to both word stress and intonation. The technique can be used by native and nonnative English-speaking teachers and is applicable to students of different levels and language backgrounds. Pronounced as /m/, "mmm" is a sound that should be easy for speakers of any…

Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate…

Word stress instruction has increasingly become a focus among EFL teachers. Owing to the phonological differences between the learner's first language and English, EFL learners of different nationalities encounter varying degrees of difficulty when pronouncing English polysyllabic words. The majority of EFL students studying medicine tend to find…

There are contradictory findings in the literature about prosodic sensitivity's contribution to reading. In this study, we examined whether prosodic sensitivity makes a unique contribution to different reading outcomes in German after controlling for the effects of phonological awareness. Word reading, nonword reading and sentence reading as well…

This study examined how toddler looking to a discourse referent is mediated by the information status of the referent and the pitch contour of the referring expression. Eighteen-month-olds saw a short discourse of three sets of images with the proportion of looking time to a target analyzed during the final image. At test, the information status…

Purpose: The objective of this study was to determine if and how the subcortical neural representation of pitch cues in listeners with normal hearing is affected by systematic manipulation of vocoder parameters. Method: This study assessed the effects of temporal envelope cutoff frequency (50 and 500 Hz), number of channels (1-32), and carrier…

Despite having different semantic profiles, near synonyms are usually presented in dictionaries as being contextually interchangeable, which may lead EFL learners to assume their contextual interchangeability. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies on how near synonyms are similar or different in their semantic and grammatical preferences.…

Purpose: Pitch variations (tone productions) have been reported as a measure to differentiate Cantonese-speaking children with and without childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). This study aims to examine fundamental frequency (F0) changes within syllables and the effects of syllable structure, lexical status, and syllable positions on F0 in…

In Korean language, questions containing ambiguous wh-words may be interpreted as either wh-questions or yes-no questions. This study investigated 43 Korean three-year-olds' ability to disambiguate eight indeterminate questions using prosodic and visual cues. The intonation of each question provided a cue as to whether it should be interpreted as…

Background: Acquired brain injury (ABI), especially to the right hemisphere, can result in difficulty using or understanding prosodic contours in speech. Prosody is used to convey emotional connotation or linguistic intent and includes pitch, loudness, rate, and voice quality. A disorder in the comprehension or production of prosody is known as…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the speech prosody of postlingually deaf cochlear implant (CI) users compared with control speakers without hearing or speech impairment. Method: Speech recordings of 74 CI users (37 males and 37 females) and 72 age-balanced control speakers (36 males and 36 females) are considered. All…

Purpose: This review was designed to provide a systematic overview of prosody in people with a primary diagnosis of dementia (PwD) and evaluate the potential use of prosodic features for diagnosis of dementia. Method: A systematic search of five databases was conducted using Medical Subject Headings and keywords. Studies included in the review…