This study investigated the relation between lexical development and the production of prosodic prominence in disyllabic babble and words. Monthly recordings from nine typically developing Belgian-Dutch-speaking infants were analyzed from the onset of babbling until a cumulative vocabulary of 200 words was reached. The differentiation between the…

This dissertation aims to extend our knowledge of prosody--in particular, what kinds of information may be conveyed through prosody, which prosodic dimensions may be used to convey them, and how individual speakers differ from one another in how they use prosody. Four production studies were conducted to examine how various factors interact with…

This paper investigates the extent to which productive use of formulaic sequences by intermediate students of two typologically different languages, i.e., English and Spanish, is associated with their oral proficiency in these languages. Previous research (e.g., Boers et al., "Language Teaching Research" 10: 245-261, 2006) has shown that…

To examine the neural correlates of spoken idiom comprehension, we conducted an event-related functional MRI study with a "rapid sentence decision" task. The spoken sentences were equally familiar but varied in degrees of "idiom figurativeness". Our results show that "figurativeness" co-varied with neural activity in the left ventral dorsolateral…

Probes the relation between speech perception and reading ability of children who were good or poor readers. Results indicate that reading-related perception differences were especially marked in a comparison of actual and predicted discrimination scores. Identification slope and phoneme boundary differences between reader groups were found as…

Examines how Japanese learners of English transmit information in the target language. Results indicate that the amount of utterance and information did not necessarily correlate; speech patterns of the Japanese differed from those of native speakers; and the students possessed potential oral proficiency if given enough time. (26 references)…

This study reports a small-scale experiment that was set up to estimate the extent to which (i) the use of formulaic sequences (standardized phrases such as collocations and idiomatic expressions) can help learners come across as proficient L2 speakers and (ii) an instructional method that emphasizes "noticing" of L2 formulaic sequences can help…

Sociolinguistic Studies in a Data Base of Spoken Swedish (Sprakdata) is a project to describe the language from a semantic-communicative point of view. The purposes are to (1) investigate the possibility of grouping informants based on results of a semantic-communicative analysis of recorded spoken language and (2) examine possible…