Prosody or "melody in speech" in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often perceived as atypical. This study examined perception and production of statements and questions in 84 children, adolescents and adults with and without ASD, as well as participants' pitch direction discrimination thresholds. The results suggested that the abilities…

Purpose: The study aimed to examine whether oral reading prosody--the use of acoustic features (e.g., pitch and duration variations) when reading passages aloud--predicts reading fluency and comprehension abilities. Method: We measured vocabulary, syntax, word reading, reading fluency (including rate and accuracy), reading comprehension (in Grades…

We investigated the dimensionality of various indicators of reading prosody, and the relations of word reading and listening comprehension to the identified dimension(s) of reading prosody, using longitudinal data from Grades 1 to 3. A total of 371 English-speaking children were assessed on oral text reading, word reading, and listening…

Background: This study was designed to extend our understanding of phonology and reading to include suprasegmental awareness using measures of prosodic awareness, which are complex tasks that tap into the rhythmic aspects of phonology. By requiring participants to access, reflect on and manipulate word stress, the prosodic awareness measures used…

We examined the relationship between two metalinguistic tasks: prosodic awareness and punctuation ability. Specifically, we investigated whether adults' ability to punctuate was related to the degree to which they are aware of and able to manipulate prosody in spoken language. English-speaking adult readers (n = 115) were administered a receptive…

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…

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…

Prosodic awareness (the rhythmic patterning of speech) accounts for unique variance in reading development. However, studies have thus far focused on early readers and utilised literacy measures which fail to distinguish between monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. The current study investigated the factors that are specifically associated with…

The importance of prosodic elements is recognised in most definitions of fluency. Although speed and accuracy have been typically considered the constituents of reading fluency, prosody is emerging as an additional component. The relevance of prosody in comprehension is increasingly recognised in the latest studies. The purpose of this research is…

The current study longitudinally examined the influence of aptitude on second language (L2) pronunciation development when 40 first-year Japanese university students engaged in practice activities inside and outside English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms over one academic year. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited at the beginning, middle,…

This exploratory study investigated whether joint attention through eye gaze was predictive of second language (L2) speakers' responses to recasts. L2 English learners (N = 20) carried out communicative tasks with research assistants who provided feedback in response to non-targetlike (non-TL) forms. Their interaction was audio-recorded and their…

This study discusses the construct of oral reading fluency and examines its relationship to reading comprehension among adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners of four first language (L1) backgrounds. One hundred and forty-nine adult learners of English with Arabic, Japanese, Spanish and Chinese language backgrounds participated in this…

Prosodic patterning is a key structural element of spoken language. However, the potential role of prosodic awareness in the phonological difficulties that characterise children with developmental dyslexia has been little studied. Here we report the first longitudinal study of sensitivity to syllable stress in children with dyslexia, enabling the…

This study reports an exploratory analysis of the age of arrival (AoA) effect on the production of second language (L2) prosody. Three groups of Mandarin-speaking immigrants (N = 10 in each group) with varying AoA in the United States and ten native speakers of English as controls participated in the study. All participants read a paragraph of…