Rhythmic structure in speech is characterized by sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables. A large body of literature suggests that speakers of English attempt to achieve rhythmic harmony by evenly distributing stressed syllables throughout prosodic phrases. The question remains as to how speakers plan metrical structure during speech…

Bilingual infants must navigate the similarities and differences between their languages to achieve native proficiency in childhood. Bilinguals learning to find individual words in fluent speech face the possibility of conflicting cues to word boundaries across their languages. Despite this challenge, bilingual infants typically begin to segment…

This study investigated the integration of word- and phrase-level prominences in speech produced by twenty-five school-aged children (6;2 to 7;3) and twenty-five adults. Participants produced disyllabic number words in a straight count condition and in two phrasal conditions, namely, a stress clash and non-clash phrasal context. Duration and…

Purpose: Previous work on the temporal coordination between gesture and speech found that the prominence in gesture coordinates with speech prominence. In this study, the authors investigated the anchoring regions in speech and pointing gesture that align with each other. The authors hypothesized that (a) in contrastive focus conditions, the…

This study analyses the scaling and alignment of low and high intonational targets in the speech of 27 children--nine English-speaking, nine Catalan-speaking and nine Spanish-speaking--between the ages of two and six years. We compared the intonational patterns of words controlled for number of syllables and stress position in the child speech to…

A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of…

In this study, segmental and prosodic aspects of word repetition and non-word repetition in typically developing children aged four to six years were investigated. Focus was on developmental differences, and on how tonal word accent and word length affect segment production accuracy. Prosodically controlled words and non-words were repeated by 44…

Linguistic stress and sequential statistical cues to word boundaries interact during speech segmentation in infancy. However, little is known about how the different acoustic components of stress constrain statistical learning. The current studies were designed to investigate whether intensity and duration each function independently as cues to…

Prosodic patterning is a key structural element of spoken language. However, the potential role of prosodic awareness in the phonological difficulties that characterise children with developmental dyslexia has been little studied. Here we report the first longitudinal study of sensitivity to syllable stress in children with dyslexia, enabling the…

A common feature of public speech in Catalan is the placement of prominence on lexically unstressed syllables ("emphatic stress"). This paper presents an acoustic study of radio speech data. Instances of emphatic stress were perceptually identified. Within-word comparison between vowels with emphatic stress and vowels with primary lexical stress…

Imitation in speech refers to the unintentional transfer of phonologically irrelevant acoustic-phonetic information of auditory input into speech motor output. Evidence for such imitation effects has been explained within the framework of episodic theories. However, it is largely unclear, which neural structures mediate speech imitation and how…

This study investigated suprasegmental variables of syllable stress and intonation contours in contextual speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC) by inexperienced signers. Ten hearing inexperienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech-alone (SA) conditions speaking a set of sentences containing stressed versus…

This thesis provides a comprehensive account of the intonational phonology of Lakota, an indigenous North American language of the Siouan family. Lakota is predominantly a verb final language, characterized by complex verbal morphology. The phonological description of Lakota intonation and prosody presented here is based on acoustic analysis of…

Although many studies of speech errors have been presented in the literature, most have focused on errors occurring at either the segmental or feature level. Few, if any, studies have dealt with the prosodic structure of errors. This paper aims to fill this gap by taking up the issue of prosodic structure in Japanese speech errors, with a focus on…

Purpose: This article investigates jaw-finger coordination in a task involving pointing to a target while naming it with a 'CVCV (e.g., /'papa/) versus CV'CV (e.g., /pa'pa/) word. According to the authors' working hypothesis, the pointing apex (gesture extremum) would be synchronized with the apex of the jaw-opening gesture corresponding to the…