This study investigates the role of prosody in narration as a function of Labovian narrative structure and stancetaking in identity performance. This study is both an extension and enhancement of preliminary work that looked at a handful of prosodic features in Mexican Spanish narratives, and a novel investigation into discursive acts expressed…

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…

In young adults and adolescents, dyslexia typically is characterized by slow or laborious reading. These reading difficulties are underpinned at least partly by a phonological deficit that disrupts cognitive connections between spoken and written language. Prosodic stress is a phonological property of spoken language reflecting differences in…

Background: Previous research has shown that syllables are important units in visual word recognition in Spanish. If they are treated as real phonological units, then other related phonological features such as lexical stress (syllable prominence) may also play a role in this process. At times, lexical stress is the only difference between minimal…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to examine whether there is a listening preference for child-directed speech (CDS) over backward speech in moderate-preterm infants (MPIs). Method: Eighteen MPIs of gestational age of 32.0 weeks (range: 32-34.06 weeks), chronological age of 8.09 months, and maturation age of 6.48 months served as the…

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…

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)…

Rhythm perception seems to be crucial to language development. Many studies have shown that children with developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder have difficulties in processing rhythmic structures. In this study, we investigated the relationships between prosody and musical processing in Italian children with typical and…

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…

Classroom time is limited, so the priority question in teaching pronunciation is to find an effective sequence of presentation. This article recounts one teacher's path to learning about different approaches to teaching English rhythm and why it is important. For many years, a common way of distinguishing languages has been based on the assumption…

Language has a rhythmic structure, but little is known about the mechanisms that underlie how it is planned. Traditional models of language production assume that metrical and segmental planning occur independently and in parallel (Roelofs & Meyer, 1998). We test this claim in three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants completed an…

We investigated production of lexical stress in children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD), all monolingual Italian speakers. The mean age of the 16 autistic children was 5.73 years and the mean age of the 16 typically developing children was 4.65 years. Picture-naming targets were five trisyllabic words that began with a…

How would you begin to introduce ESL/EFL students to English vowel sounds? This Reflective Question and many others await your discussion and analysis in this revised edition of TESOL Press's best-selling "Teaching Pronunciation." This volume explores different approaches to teaching pronunciation in second language classrooms and…

German plural formation appears unsystematic and largely arbitrary to many second language (L2) learners. While some approaches have attempted to identify patterns and rules to help L2 learners (e.g., Anton et al., 2017; Di Donato & Clyde, 2020; Kraiss, 2014), one central observation from linguistic analysis has been absent from pedagogical…

Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible…