Children who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) using Listening and spoken language (LSL) as their primary mode of communication have emerged as a growing population in general education and special education classroom settings, and have educational performance expectations similar to their same aged hearing peers. Academic instruction that…

The importance of secondary-stressed (SS) and unstressed-unreduced (UU) syllable accuracy for spoken word recognition in English is as yet unclear. An acoustic study first investigated Russian learners' of English production of SS and UU syllables. Significant vowel quality and duration reductions in Russian-spoken SS and UU vowels were found,…

A crossmodal effect has been observed in the processing of facial and vocal emotion in adults and infants. For the first time, we assessed whether this effect is present in childhood by administering a crossmodal task similar to those used in seminal studies featuring emotional faces (i.e., a continuum of emotional expressions running from…

The work described in this report is the second phase of a project to provide easy-to-use tools for authoring and rendering secondary-school algebra-level math expressions in synthesized speech that is useful for students with blindness or low vision. This report describes the development and results of the second feedback study performed for our…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of oral reading expressiveness on the comprehension of storybooks by 4- and 5-year-old prekindergarten children. The possible impact of prosody on listening comprehension was explored. Method: Ninety-two prekindergarten children (M age = 57.26 months, SD = 3.89 months) listened to an…

The prosody of the stanzaic poems called madrasê, written in Syriac by Ephrem of Nisibis in the fourth century, has long been studied by scholars. Until now, these studies have focused on meter, but this has left many questions unanswered. The present study examines the interclausal syntax of individual stanzas of madrasê V and VI of the cycle on…

This paper reports the results of an experiment that elicits contextual effects on Rising and Falling accents in Standard Serbian, with the goal of determining their acoustic correlates and their phonological representation. Materials systematically vary the distance between pitch accents, inducing "tone crowding," in order to identify the…

This quasi-experimental research explores the difference between the pausing patterns of native English and nonnative Turkish speakers of English concerning their pause durations preceding and following English adverbial clause conjunctions. The findings reveal statistically significant differences between native and nonnative participants for two…

This study explored the feasibility of training school teaching assistants to provide the treatment, Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing to treat childhood apraxia of speech (CAS, also known as developmental verbal dyspraxia). The study used a single case experimental design across behaviours and a qualitative evaluation of teaching assistant…

The effects of repeated oral reading and timed reading on L2 oral reading fluency were examined among Japanese university students (N = 50) over 12 weeks. Three quasi-experimental groups were used in the study. Group 1 practiced two types of reading: Repeated oral reading with chunking practice and timed reading. Group 2 did timed reading only.…

The current study extracted, first, 17 general patterns of intonation. Additionally, the present study investigated the roles that might be played by the gender of Ilami EFL teachers in observing the 17 patterns of intonation. Finally, the study determined if intonation as a suprasegmental feature of speech is affected by the gender of Ilami EFL…

Over the past two decades the concept of semantic prosody has attracted considerable research interest since Sinclair (1991) observed that "many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment" (p. 112). Sinclair (2003) also noted that semantic prosody conveys its pragmatic meaning and attitudinal…

As a case study of non-linguists' perceptions of accent, this paper investigates how accurately and on what basis Japanese-accented English (JAE) is discernible from other L2 varieties of English in New Zealand (NZ). The paper sheds light on how a feature salient in speech is associated with the perceived sociolinguistic identity of speakers. An…

This study aimed to investigate specific associations between structural and acoustic characteristics of infant-directed (ID) speech and word recognition. Thirty Italian-acquiring children and their mothers were tested when the children were 1;3. Children's word recognition was measured with the looking-while-listening task. Maternal ID speech was…