Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a specific register that adults use to address infants, and it is characterised by prosodic exaggeration and lexical and syntactic simplification. Several authors have underlined that this simplified speech becomes more complex according to the infant's age. However, there is a lack of studies on lexical and…

Research has suggested that the type and frequency of learning strategies employed by successful listeners is greater than their less successful counterparts. Based on evidence that metacognitive strategies (e.g. listening-for-gist; inferring meaning) are more effective than cognitive ones (e.g. word-for-word translation), this study sought to…

The acoustic realization of phrasal prominence is proposed to correlate with the order of V(erbs) and O(bjects) in natural languages. The present production study with 15 talkers of Japanese (OV) and English (VO) investigates whether the speech signal contains coverbal visual information that covaries with auditory prosody, in Infant- and…

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…

Prosody is a linguistic feature in spoken English that is complex yet plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, many EFL pronunciation classes in Thailand have not adequately emphasized the importance and functions of prosody to learners. This research study aims to investigate effect of an oral fluency instructional method…

This study investigates the pitch properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) specific to word-learning contexts in which mothers introduce unfamiliar words to children. Using a semi-spontaneous story-book telling task, we examined (1) whether mothers made distinctions between unfamiliar and familiar words with pitch in IDS compared to…

The current project longitudinally investigated the extent to which first-year Japanese university students developed their second language (L2) oral ability in relation to increased input in foreign language classrooms. Their spontaneous speech was elicited at the beginning, middle and end of one academic year, and then judged by linguistically…

This study explores the developmental change of mother-child interactions in order to investigate which aspects of maternal behavior affect children's speech production. To this end, the interactions between 79 German-speaking mothers and their two- or five-year-old children were observed at two time points (12 months apart) and in two interactive…

This study aimed to investigate specific associations between structural and acoustic characteristics of infant-directed (ID) speech and word recognition. Thirty Italian-acquiring children and their mothers were tested when the children were 1;3. Children's word recognition was measured with the looking-while-listening task. Maternal ID speech was…

The ability to detect non-adjacent dependencies (i.e. between "a" and "b" in "aXb") in spoken input may support the acquisition of morpho-syntactic dependencies (e.g. "The princess 'is' kiss'ing' the frog"). Functional morphemes in morpho-syntactic dependencies are often marked by perceptual cues that render…

This paper reports on an intervention study with young Polish beginners (mean age: 8 years, 3 months) learning English at school. It seeks to identify whether exposure to rhythmic input improves knowledge of word order and function words. The "prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis", relevant in developmental psycholinguistics, provided the…

In diglossic contexts, when speakers typically use two different languages on a regular basis, bilingual speakers display a wide array of attitudes towards each of their languages and associated cultures (Galindo, 1995) and such variability in attitudes can affect their linguistic behaviors (Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner & Fillenbaum, 1960).…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…

This thesis has two broad goals. The first is to contribute to the study of Arabic phonology particularly syllable structure and syllabification. This will be achieved through examining phenomena related to syllable structure and syllabic weight such as syllabification, stress assignment, epenthesis, syncope, and sonority in three different…