The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

In this article we look at some of the structural properties of second language (L2) Japanese WH questions. In Japanese the WH words are licensed to remain "in situ" by the prosodic contiguity properties of the phrases which have no prosodic boundaries between the WH word and the question particle. In a rehearsed-reading, sentence…

While most empirical studies have investigated the improvement of learners' L2 spoken proficiency via speaking-related interventions, the present study examined the same topic through a different modality: listening. Ninety-five first-year tertiary-level students of English as a second language (ESL) in Hong Kong participated in this three-month…

This dissertation examines the interface between music and language in "Huju", which is a Shanghai dialect based regional opera. Chapter I is a short introduction. Chapter II presents a thorough review of the studies on linguistic tone and music tune, and provides descriptive background information about "Huju" and Shanghai…

Spoken English has a stress-alternating rhythm that is not marked in its orthography. In two experiments, the authors evaluated whether stylistic alterations to print that marked stress pulses fostered the rendering of rhythm (experiment 1) and stress (experiment 2) during silent reading. In experiment 1, silent readers rated the helpfulness of…

A noun can be potentially ambiguous as to whether it is a head on its own, or is a modifier of a Noun + Noun compound waiting for its head. This study investigates whether young children can exploit the prosodic information on a modifier constituent preceding the head to facilitate resolution of such ambiguity in Japanese. Evidence from English…

The ability to infer the emotional states of others is central to our everyday interactions. These inferences can be drawn from several different sources of information occurring simultaneously in the communication situation. Based on previous studies revealing that children pay more heed to situational context than to emotional prosody when…

Late second language (L2) learners often struggle with L2 prosody, both in perception and production. This may result from first language (L1) interference or some property of how a second language functions in a late learner independent of what their L1 might be. Here we investigate prosody's role in determining information structure through…

A study investigated the order of acquisition of inflectional morphology in English within morphemes, focusing on late acquisition of one allomorph of the plural. It is proposed that late acquisition is rooted in the operation of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), which states that at the melodic level, adjacent identical elements are…

After setting definitions of pragmatics, prosody, and nonverbal communication, this paper reviews politeness theories and research in these fields, discussing their implications for teaching. It is posited that learners whose first language and native culture are more similar to the target language (TL) and culture are more likely to experience TL…

A comparison of the application of two current theories of stress to a particular stress pattern found in the Salish language Sooke is presented. Hammond's (1986) grid-like tree structure representation of stress is compared with Halle and Vergnaud's (1986) tree-like grid structure. Examples in the Australian language Maranungku show that, in…

This paper argues that the origin of the tonal accents in Low German, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian can be explained on the basis of segmental circumstances, that they may be considered as secondary in the historical development of these languages, and that they arise when the redundant tonal transition in centering diphthongs becomes distinctive…

This volume of working papers includes eight papers dealing mainly with experimental topics in linguistics and in phonology and speech. The following articles are in the collection: "Units in Speech Perception,""The Temporal Realization of Morphological and Syntactic Boundaries,""Comparison of Controlled and Uncontrolled Normal Speech Rate,""Word…

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…

A study explored the use of a text-copying task for the determination of syntactic constituent structure. It was predicted that the task would be a naturalistic, reasonably direct, and sensitive psycholinguistic research method. In two experiments, 70 subjects wrote out copies of typed passages. The points where they paused and looked back to the…