Examined mandibular correlates of prosodic control in nonread dialog exchange involving repeated corrections. Articulatory and acoustic data were collected from four American English speakers at an x-ray laboratory, measuring jaw opening. Results suggested a local and global use of the jaw-opening gesture to produce both linguistic or…

Examines the effects of prosodic variation (vocal affect) on the type of inferences six- and nine-year-old children made about a speaker's communicative intent. Demonstrates that children's interpretations of potentially ironic utterances were influenced by prosody, and the nature of this influence differed by age. (SR)

A study investigated prosodic variables of syllable stress and intonation contours in speech produced during the simultaneous communication (SC) of ten hearing sign language users. Results indicated longer sentence duration for SC than speech only conditions. Vowel duration and frequency differences between stressed and unstressed syllables were…

This study examined the right hemisphere contribution to the production of linguistic prosody where acoustic features of prosodic structures in different linguistic contexts were examined accompanied by perceptual judgements. When control and right hemisphere damaged (RHD) subjects were asked to produce lexical stress differences (Experiment 1),…

Stress assignment to three- and four-syllable Italian words is not predictable by rule, but needs lexical look-up. The present study investigated whether stress assignment to low-frequency Italian words is determined by stress regularity, or by the number of words sharing the final phonological segment and the stress pattern (stress neighborhood…

A comparison of the contour alignment of nuclear and initial prenuclear accents was carried out for the Irish dialects of Gaoth Dobhair in Ulster (GD-U) and Cois Fharraige in Connaught (CF-C). This was done across conditions where the number of unstressed syllables following the nuclear and preceding the initial prenuclear accents was varied from…

Speech production studies have shown that the phonological form of a word is made up of phonemic segments in stress-timed languages (e.g., Dutch) and of syllables in syllable timed languages (e.g., Chinese). To clarify the functional unit of mora-timed languages, the authors asked native Japanese speakers to perform an implicit priming task (A. S.…

This paper reports two studies of young English-speaking children's ability to cope with changes to the metrical stress pattern of spoken words and the relationship between this ability, phonological awareness and early reading development. Initially, 39 children aged 4 and 5 years were assessed on their ability to identify mispronounced words,…

Prosodic, or expressive, reading is considered to be one of the essential features of the achievement of reading fluency. The purpose of this study was to determine (a) the degree to which the prosody of syntactically complex sentences varied as a function of reading speed and accuracy and (b) the role that reading prosody might play in mediating…

This study investigated the effects of age, hearing loss, and cochlear implantation on mothers' speech to infants and children. We recorded normal-hearing (NH) mothers speaking to their children as they typically would do at home and speaking to an adult experimenter. Nine infants (10-37 months) were hearing-impaired and had used a cochlear…

In this study the influence of prosodic foot structure on the processing of weak syllables in children with cochlear implants (CI) was investigated. A battery of tests investigating processing of weak syllables in single and multiword utterances was carried out on four groups of children: 15 children with CI developing spoken language as expected…

It is acknowledged that contrast plays an important role in understanding discourse and information structure. While it is commonly assumed that contrast can be marked by intonation only, our understanding of the intonational realization of contrast is limited. For German there is mainly introspective evidence that the rising theme accent (or…

The production of unstressed vowels in English by early and late Korean- and Japanese-English bilinguals was investigated. All groups were nativelike in having a lower fundamental frequency for unstressed as opposed to stressed vowels. Both Korean groups made less of an intensity difference between unstressed and stressed vowels than the native…

Previous research indicates that foreign language learners are much more focused on accuracy, particularly grammatical accuracy, than their teachers are. The purpose of the current study was to gain a more detailed understanding of American learners' views of the need for accuracy in the oral production of a foreign language (German) by (a)…

This paper summarizes two Russian textbooks' presentations of stress patterns of the Russian noun and offers an alternative that aims to be simpler and pedagogically more attractive. The proposed system presents stress information by means of a base form, written by means of symbols appearing over the appropriate syllable. (CHK)