Segmentation is a cornerstone of language processing across levels of linguistic analysis, and yet, standard models of linguistic memory leave the role of higher-order segments in online comprehension understudied. This dissertation advances the Context-Sensitive Encoding (CSE) hypothesis: that implicit prosodic boundaries (Bader, 1998; J. Fodor,…

We investigated how two cues to contrast--beat gesture and contrastive pitch accenting--affect comprehenders' cognitive load during processing of spoken referring expressions. In two visual-world experiments, we orthogonally manipulated the presence of these cues and their felicity, or fit, with the local (sentence-level) referential context in…

Purpose: Spoken language is inherently multimodal and multidimensional in natural settings, but very little is known about how second language (L2) learners undertake multilayered speech signals with both phonetic and affective cues. This study investigated how late L2 learners undertake parallel processing of linguistic and affective information…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the effects of voice enthusiasm (enthusiastic voice vs calm voice) on social ratings of the speaker, cognitive load and transfer performance in multimedia learning. Design/methodology/approach: Two laboratory experiments were conducted in which learners learned from a multimedia presentation about computer…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences (["la petite 'ferme'"] ["est très jolie"] "the small farm is very…

Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here. First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies. Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether and when individuals with aphasia and healthy controls use lexical and prosodic information during on-line sentence comprehension. Individuals with aphasia and controls (n = 12 per group) participated in a self-paced listening experiment. The stimuli were early closure sentences, such as "While…

In spite of the relevant role of prosody in communication, and in contrast with other linguistic components, there is paucity of research in this field for Williams syndrome (WS). Therefore, this study performed a systematic assessment of prosodic abilities in WS. The Spanish version of the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication…

Previous research has shown that the weighting of, or attention to, acoustic cues at the level of the segment changes over the course of development ( Nittrouer & Miller, 1997; Nittrouer, Manning & Meyer, 1993). In this paper we examined changes over the course of development in weighting of acoustic cues at the suprasegmental level. Specifically,…

This study examined the right hemisphere contribution to the production of linguistic prosody where acoustic features of prosodic structures in different linguistic contexts were examined accompanied by perceptual judgements. When control and right hemisphere damaged (RHD) subjects were asked to produce lexical stress differences (Experiment 1),…