Irony comprehension in seven- and eight-year-old children with typically developing language skills was explored under the framework of the graded salience hypothesis. Target ironic remarks, either conventional or novel/situation-specific, were presented following brief story contexts. Children's responses to comprehension questions were used to…

Atypical expressive prosody is reported as a consistent challenge for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and is associated with a broad set of clinical impairments including perceptions of oddness from others. Theories of atypical prosody in ASD have attributed these impairments to the broader symptoms of ASD, particularly in the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the directionality of the relationship between text reading prosody and reading comprehension in the upper grades of primary school. We compared 3 theoretical possibilities: Two unidirectional relations from text reading prosody to reading comprehension and from reading comprehension to text reading prosody…

This study investigates the preferences for attachment of a relative clause (RC) to a complex noun phrase (NP) of the type: NP1 of NP2, in Spanish-English bilinguals and advanced learners of Spanish. Spanish speakers show a moderate preference for attaching the RC to the first NP, while speakers of English prefer the second NP. Subjects were…

This book provides a wide-ranging and in-depth theoretical perspective on dialogue in teaching. It explores the philosophy of dialogism as a social theory of language and explains its importance in teaching and learning. Departing from the more traditional teacher-led mode of teacher-student communication, the dialogic approach is more egalitarian…

Purpose: Stuttering varies between and within speaking situations. In this study, the authors used statistical process control charts with 10 case studies to investigate variability of stuttering frequency. Method: Participants were 10 adults who stutter. The authors counted the percentage of syllables stuttered (%SS) for segments of their speech…

This study investigates whether developmental dyslexia involves an impairment in implicit phonological representations, as distinct from orthographic representations and metaphonological skills. A group of adults with dyslexia was matched with a group with no history of speech/language/literacy impairment. Tasks varied in the demands made on…

This dissertation is an investigation of acoustic properties of lexical tone in two dialects of Dane-zaa (Athabaskan). The noteworthy mirror-image tone systems of the H-marked Doig and L-marked Halfway dialects provide a unique opportunity to explore intrinsic differences in how pitch manifests in specific environments. The dissertation has three…

Yucatec Maya (YM) is an indigenous language of Mexico that features both phonemic tonal distinctions and phonemic vowel length. These features are primarily associated with the phonetic cues of pitch and duration, which are also considered the primary correlates of stress in language. Though scholars have noted the existence of stress or accent…

This dissertation has two complementary objectives. First, the present study provides a contemporary reading of "hispanista" research about Mexican Spanish, including Chicano Spanish. In addition, this dissertation presents an overview and analysis of intonational findings of both Mexican Spanish (from the Los Altos region in Jalisco)…

There is an academic achievement gap between White and Black male students as evidenced by the significant difference between standardized test scores beginning in the third grade and continuing throughout secondary education. It has been postulated that this gap is influenced by differences in how teachers interact with students of color. This…

The current study addresses an aspect of second language (L2) phonological acquisition that has received little attention to date--namely, the acquisition of allophonic variation as a word boundary cue. The role of subphonemic variation in the segmentation of speech by native speakers has been indisputably demonstrated; however, the acquisition of…

Native language prosodic structure is known to modulate the processing of non-native suprasegmental information. It has been shown that native speakers of French, a language without lexical stress, have difficulties storing non-native stress contrasts. We investigated whether the ability to store lexical tone (as in Mandarin Chinese) also depends…

Accurate production of polysyllables (words of three or more syllables) can be challenging for children with phonological impairment. Research with typically developing children has suggested that children can improve their polysyllable productions in response to requests for clarification containing an incorrect model of a target word (Gozzard et…

This article offers an extended definition of prosody by examining the role of prosody in the production and comprehension of L2 spoken language from mainly a cognitive, interactionalist perspective. It reviews theoretical and empirical L1 and L2 research that have examined and explored the relationships between prosodic forms and their functions…