Recent experiments have shown that people iconically modulate their prosody corresponding with the meaning of their utterance (e.g., Shintel et al., 2006). This article reports findings from a story reading task that expands the investigation of iconic prosody to abstract meanings in addition to concrete ones. Participants read stories that…

Language education policies contain discourses that have language ideologies embedded within them. This study explores the language ideologies in official language education policy documents of Pakistan from 2000 to 2020. Using Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis techniques, a 1.28 million-word-corpus was generated from 32 policy documents…

The research concerns the problem of mastering English voice production skills in oral interpretation of the authentic belles-lettres texts. The purpose of the paper is to present the teaching algorithm of training future English language and literature teachers' skills in decoding and orally interpreting verbalised English voice prosodic…

This study aimed at investigating EFL pre-service teachers' attitudes towards pronunciation and pronunciation teaching. Another purpose was to explore the outcomes of pronunciation instruction of EFL pre-service teachers' phonological development and, based on the findings, to provide suggestions taking learners' pedagogical needs into…

Onomatopoeia are frequently identified amongst infants' earliest words (Menn & Vihman, 2011), yet few authors have considered why this might be, and even fewer have explored this phenomenon empirically. Here we analyze mothers' production of onomatopoeia in infant-directed speech (IDS) to provide an input-based perspective on these forms.…

Prosody is evaluated as an important factor in fluent reading, and in literature it is expressed as a significant reading skill that affects comprehension. Prosody--described as a fluent reading ability of a reader with suitable sentences and expressions--includes stress, intonation, duration (time passed on voicing a word) and pausing properties…

The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language. Strong cross-linguistic tendencies in syllable size and shape are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure, a type which is also privileged in abstract models of the syllable. Syllable patterns such as those found in Itelmen "qsa?txt??"…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Purpose: One promising early marker for autism and other communicative and language disorders is early infant speech production. Here we used daylong recordings of high- and low-risk infant-mother dyads to examine whether acoustic-prosodic alignment as well as two automated measures of infant vocalization are related to developmental risk status…

We tested the prosodic hypothesis that the temporal alignment of a speaker's beat gestures in a sentence influences syntactic parsing by driving the listener's attention. Participants chose between two possible interpretations of relative-clause (RC) ambiguous sentences, while their electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. We manipulated the…

This study examines the role of listeners' native language (L1) background in judgments of comprehensibility (ease of understanding) for speakers from same and different L1 backgrounds, to determine the extent of a shared second language (L2) comprehensibility benefit. Forty L2 English speakers from Mandarin, French, Hindi, and English backgrounds…

This research report provides an overview of the R&D efforts at Educational Testing Service related to its capability for automated scoring of nonnative spontaneous speech with the "SpeechRater"? automated scoring service since its initial version was deployed in 2006. While most aspects of this R&D work have been published in…

This study investigates prosodic modulation in the spontaneous canonical babble of congenitally deaf infants with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) infants. Research has shown that the acoustic cues to prominence are less modulated in CI babble. However acoustic measurements of individual cues to prominence give incomplete…

It is generally assumed that prosodic cues that provide linguistic information, like discourse status, are driven primarily by the information structure of the conversation. This article investigates whether speakers have the capacity to adjust subtle acoustic-phonetic properties of the prosodic signal when they find themselves in contexts in…

Automated alignment of transcriptions to audio files expedites the process of preparing data for acoustic analysis. Unfortunately, the benefits of auto-alignment have generally been available only to researchers studying majority languages, for which large corpora exist and for which acoustic models have been created by large-scale research…