Prosody plays a variety of roles in infants' communicative development, aiding in attention modulation, speech segmentation, and syntax acquisition. This study investigates the extent to which parents also spontaneously modulate prosodic aspects of infant directed speech in ways that distinguish semantic aspects of language. Fourteen mothers of…

The first part of this study examined (Parisian) French-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of the six definite and indefinite French articles: "le", "la", "les", "un", "une", and "des". The six articles were compared with pseudoarticles in the context of disyllabic or monosyllabic…

Examined Dutch listeners' use of suprasegmental information in spoken-word recognition. Isolated syllables exised from minimal stress pairs such as "VOORnaam/voorNAAM" could be reliably assigned to their source words. Results indicate that Dutch listeners effectively exploit suprasegmental cues in recognizing spoken words. (Author/VWL)

Four cross-modal priming experiments and two forced-choice identification experiments investigated the use of suprasegmental cues to stress in the recognition of spoken English words by native English speaking and nonnative (Dutch) listeners. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)