This study compared the speech and prosody-voice profiles for 30 male speakers with either high-functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger syndrome (AS), and 53 typically developing male speakers. Both HFA and AS groups had more residual articulation distortion errors and utterances coded as inappropriate for phrasing, stress, and resonance. AS speakers…

We present an acoustic study of segmental and prosodic properties of words produced by a female speaker of Chinese with left-hemisphere brain damage. We measured the location of the point vowels /a, e, @?, i, y, o, u/ and determined their separation in the vowel plane, and their perceptual distinctivity. Similarly, the acoustic properties of the…

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)…

The history of Slavic prosody gives an account of Slavic languages at the time of their differentiation and relates these developments to issues in phonological theory. It is first argued that the syllable structure of Slavic changes before the fall of the jers and suggests that intra- and intersyllabic reorganization in Late Common Slavic was far…

The relationship between turn-regulation, the phonetic features of pitch, and loudness is examined in a study of two recorded natural conversations in Akan. Analysis of patterns in turn-delimitation suggests that (1) diminuendo loudness, a low pitch height, and falling pitch movement are treated by turn-occupants and their co-participants as…

The phenomenon of the modified register, here termed Foreigner Register, the register of language that is used by language teachers with students of perceived low language proficiency, is discussed. As used by language teachers, Foreigner Register is well formed and simplified or modified in terms of syntax, phonology, and lexis. The…

A unified, coherent pedagogical treatment of stress in all inflected words in Russian is elaborated here, using three notational symbols: the acute, the crossed acute and the wedge. (CHK)

The phonological rule that assigns stress at the word level in Modern French is examined in an effort to show how a consideration of productivity, morphological relatedness, and grammatical conditioning motivates a phonetically determined stress rule for Modern French. (Author/RM)

The following three levels of intonation are described, and their relationship is discussed: 1) a concrete and atomistic level of the perceptually relevant pitch movements, 2) a concrete and global level of the audible pitch contours and the measurable fundamental frequency curves, and 3) an abstract and global level of intonation patterns.…

A case study of a 2-year-old progressing normally in speech development provides evidence of suprasegmental marking of the plural, thought to be adopted only in language-impaired children. Acoustic analyses of the durations and intensity of elicited words indicate that the child had adopted a suprasegmental strategy for marking the singular/plural…

The acoustic features and functions of accentuation in French are discussed, and features of accentuation in the speech of French 2-year-olds are explored. The four major acoustic features used to signal accentual distinctions are fundamental frequency of voicing, duration of segments and syllables, intensity of segments and syllables, and…

The article accounts for the phenomenon of aspiration in Jaffna Tamil, a dialect distinct form South Indian dialects of Tamil. Not being distinctive orphonologically determined, aspiration is dealt with as a prosodic feature affecting voiceless stops in various positions. Distribution and symbolic representation are handled; kymographic evidence…