Describes a study which examines the relationship between context redundancy and keyword intelligibility in sentences having both high and low redundancy. Word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. (SED)

Examines the prosodic characteristics of "motherese" in the speech of 24 German mothers. Each subject was recorded while addressing (1) her three- to five-day-old baby, (2) the absent infant, as if present, and (3) the adult interviewer. Several hypotheses regarding short and long term effects of "motherese" are discussed.…

Abbreviated version of this paper was read under the title Nuclear Accent and Intonation Rules of English'' at the 1970 summer meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, in Columbus, Ohio, and an interim version appeared in UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics'' (1971). (VM)

Demonstrates that "contractions and their related uncontracted counterparts may have different derivational histories, different semantic contents and different syntactic functions" and discusses the implications of these findings for the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. Revised version of a paper presented at the…

Details a study that explored whether a visual syllable duration pattern affected comprehension and whether the fluency effect could be obtained when accuracy of word pronunciation and rate of reading were used as criteria for fluency. (HOD)

Reexamines data concerning the effect a mobile vowel, followed by the zero-ending, has on a stem's stress pattern in Contemporary Standard Russian. Suggests a new representation of the stress patterns of stems with the vowel-zero alternation. (PMJ)

Discusses grammatical morpheme omissions in the phrase productions of children with language impairments. Clinical procedures are described whereby the salience of grammatical morpheme models is increased and the difficulty of production of grammatical morphemes is controlled via manipulation of prosodic contexts to enhance learning of grammatical…

Grosjean and Gee's prosodic structure theory is applied to second-language listening comprehension. It is argued that second-language students whose native language is syllable-timed do not have a mechanism to deal with unstressed syllables and must create one. The absences of this mechanism helps explain difficulties in listening comprehension.…

By examining data on historical changes in pitch accent plus data from present-day speech analysis, the article concludes that suprasegmental changes are in progress in both Japanese and English languages. Although English and Japanese use different phonetic resources to implement accentuation, vacillation in their respective suprasegmental…

Examines metrical segmentation strategy in Dutch. The first experiment shows that stress strongly affects Dutch listeners' ability and speed in spotting Dutch monosyllabic words in disyllabic nonwords. The second experiment finds the same stress effect when only the target words are presented without a subsequent syllable triggering segmentation.…

Compared disyllabic sequences from infants and adults according to their use of frequency, intensity, and duration to mark stress. Concluded that infants in English language environments produce adult-like stress patterns before they produce lexical items, which specify stress. Acoustic and perceptual analyses indicated infants use three acoustic…

In this study, seven children with specific language impairment (SLI) and speech deficits were matched with same age peers and evaluated for iambic (weak-strong) and trochaic (strong-weak) prosodic speech forms. Findings indicated that children with SLI and speech deficits show less mature segmental and speech motor systems, as well as decreased…

Impaired speech prosody has been identified as a critical feature of suspected childhood apraxia of speech (sCAS). Lexical stress productions of children with sCAS have been characterized as 'excessive/equal/misplaced'. This investigation examines two potential explanations of this particular deficit, articulatory difficulty and impaired intrinsic…

Spoken language comprehension requires the coordination of different subprocesses in time. After the initial acoustic analysis the system has to extract segmental information such as phonemes, syntactic elements and lexical-semantic elements as well as suprasegmental information such as accentuation and intonational phrases, i.e., prosody.…

Speakers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show difficulties in suprasegmental aspects of speech production, or "prosody," those aspects of speech that accompany words and sentences and create what is commonly called "tone of voice." However, little is known about the perception of prosody, or about the specific aspects of…