We report on three experiments that aim at measuring the role of prosody in the acceptability and interpretation of discourse relations between utterances connected by two French discourse markers, viz. "et" "and" and "alors" "then/well." These two discourse markers are highly polyfunctional: "et"…

In order to study problems of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) with morphosyntax, we investigated twenty high-functioning Greek-speaking children (mean age: 6;11) and twenty age- and language-matched typically developing children on environments that allow or forbid object clitics or their corresponding noun phrase. Children with…

Prosody plays a vital role in communication, but is one of the most widely neglected topics in language documentation. This omission is doubly detrimental since intonation is unrecoverable from transcribed texts, the most prevalent data sources for many indigenous languages. One of the underlying reasons for the dearth of prosodic data is…

Investigation of the use of five speech markers in the native and second-language production of French-English bilinguals (N=10) found no quantitative difference in the frequency of occurrence of speech markers between the high (N=5) and low (N=5) fluency speakers, although high-fluency speakers used more progressive than regressive marker types.…

When second, fourth, and sixth grade students were asked "What's this?" questions (differing in intonation and stress) and guessed whether there were new or different objects pictured on cards, results indicated that use of intonation was recognized as a marker for topic collaboration by grade four. (Author/CB)

A discussion of points raised by Dell Hymes in his article "On Communicative Competence" leads to a proposal for a clearer and more comprehensive theory of communicative competence based on two models, a matrix of discourse analysis and a model of communication interaction. Pedagogical implications of the theory are considered, including the…

Using a comparative rhetoric model, a study examined the discourse behavior of native speakers of American English conducting peer review discussions in English and that of native speakers of Chinese performing the same task in Chinese. Data are drawn from audiotape recordings of peer review discussions of eight college students, conducted in…

Two related studies investigated (1) the extent to which native language input to five Japanese children was varied based on the children's age, and (2) the effectiveness of adult Japanese second language input to a three-year-old American child during a one-month period in Japan. In the first study, interactions of adult-child dyads were compared…

Investigates the relationship between age of arrival in the second-language environment and a preference for prosodic versus syntactic cues to sentence interpretation in English. The study found that older English-as-a-Second-Language learners were just as likely as the younger ones to attend to prosody rather than syntax. (43 references)…