It has been shown in the past that International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) struggle with phonological and communication issues in the classroom (Pickering, 1999; 2001). This issue leads to misunderstandings between ITAs and undergraduate students, frustrating them both as well as the parents of the students and the departments. However, studies…

Understanding speech in an accent or dialect different than one's own can be challenging. McLaughlin and Van Engen (2020) were the first to quantify this increase in listening effort using Task Evoked Pupillary Response (TEPR), a common measure of cognitive arousal. They found that monolingual, English speaking adults' pupils dilated more quickly…

In this paper, I first provide a brief review of how scholars have conceptualized, tested, and elaborated aptitude frameworks relevant to second language (L2) speech learning. Subsequently, I introduce an emerging paradigm that assigns a fundamental role to domain-general auditory processing (i.e., having a good ear) in L1 speech acquisition and…

Recursive NPs are difficult to produce and late to emerge. We compare prosodic and syntactic abilities in Japanese-speaking five- and six-year-olds (n = 28) and adults (n = 10). It is reported that syntactic structure in Japanese is prosodically marked via downstep and metrical boost. Results of an elicited imitation task suggested that children…

This controlled experimental study investigated the interaction of variables associated with rating the pronunciation component of high-stakes English-language-speaking tests such as IELTS and TOEFL iBT. One hundred experienced raters who were all either familiar or unfamiliar with Brazilian-accented English or Papua New Guinean Tok Pisin-accented…

Purpose: Lexical stress and phoneme processes converge during phonological encoding, but the nature of the convergence has been debated. Stress patterns and phonemes may be integrated automatically and rigidly, resulting in a unified representation. Alternatively, stress and phoneme may be processed interactively based on sublexical contexts. The…

Purpose: This study aimed to obtain a comprehensive understanding about how Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) performed speech prosody in a connected discourse and to what extent their prosodic scenario differed from those normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method: Fifteen prelingually deaf Mandarin-speaking children with unilateral…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of nonmodal phonation on estimates of subglottal pressure (Ps) derived from the magnitude of a neck-surface accelerometer (ACC) signal and to confirm previous findings regarding the impact of vowel contexts and pitch levels in a larger cohort of participants. Method: Twenty-six vocally…

This study investigates the effects of prosodic sensitivity on reading. Highly capable adult musicians (i.e., persons with potentially excellent prosodic skills) and non-musicians were compared in terms of prosodic sensitivity and reading. Furthermore, the study examines possible reciprocal effects of prosodic sensitivity and reading. Sixty native…

This paper investigates whether typical stress patterns in English nouns and verbs are available as a prosodic cue for categorisation and accelerated word learning during first language acquisition. The stress typicality hypothesis states that left-stressed nouns and right-stressed verbs should be acquired earlier than the reverse configurations…

Echo phonology was originally proposed to account for obligatory coordination of manual and mouth articulations observed in several sign languages. However, previous research into the phenomenon lacks clear criteria for which components of movement can or must be copied when the articulators are so different. Nor is there discussion of which…

This study explores how young children infer nuances in epistemic modality through prosody. A forced-choice task was used, testing children's (ages three to seven) comprehension of the "might"/"will" distinction (modal condition) as well their ability to modulate the strength of "might" through two prosodic tunes…

Most orthographies contain both accented and non-accented vowels. But are they processed as variants of the same letter unit or as separate abstract units? Recent research in French has revealed that accented vowels seem to be processed as separate units. Here we examined whether this phenomenon is universal or language-specific. We chose Spanish…

Purpose: Smoothed cepstral peak prominence (CPPS) and harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR) are acoustic measures related to the periodicity, harmonicity, and noise components of an acoustic signal. To date, there is little evidence about the advantages of CPPS over HNR in voice diagnostics. Recent studies indicate that voice fundamental frequency (F0)…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is phonetically distinct from adult-directed speech (ADS): It is typically considered to have special prosody--like higher pitch and slower speaking rates--as well as unique speech sound properties, for example, more breathy, hyperarticulated, and/or variable consonant and vowel articulation. These phonetic features…