The article describes the contrastive possibilities of alignment of high accents in three Romance varieties, namely, Central Catalan, Neapolitan Italian, and Pisa Italian. The Romance languages analyzed in this article provide crucial evidence that small differences in alignment in rising accents should be encoded phonologically. To account for…

Augments Michael Studdert-Kennedy's state-of-the-art report on speech perception research (EJ 227 656) with comments on categorical perception of speech and nonspeech stimuli, speech perception in context, the role of prosody, and development/impairments of speech perception. Includes a summary of a discussion on speech perception research. (RL)

Discusses grammatical morpheme omissions in the phrase productions of children with language impairments. Clinical procedures are described whereby the salience of grammatical morpheme models is increased and the difficulty of production of grammatical morphemes is controlled via manipulation of prosodic contexts to enhance learning of grammatical…

Discusses reasons for including prosody in the management of language impairment in children and presents a classification framework that includes four categories of prosodic problems: dysprosody (pitch, loudness, duration, and pausing), prosodic disability (tempo, intonation, stress, and rhythm), prosodic disturbance (interaction disruption), and…

Outlines the stages of prosodic development that children follow from the beginning of word acquisition through the end of the second year of life. How these stages can be used to provide a model for treatment when working with children who display delayed phonological development is addressed. (Author/CR)

Examines the role of suprasegmental phonology in speech processing and its implications for reading instruction; also reviews evidence for the hypothesis that prosodic features cue the boundaries of perceptually functional units in spoken sentences, thus assisting the listener in the segmentation of verbal information. (FL)

Reviews research on prosody and segmental perception, segmentation and invariance, categorical perception of speech and nonspeech, feature detectors, scaling speech sounds to an auditory-articulatory space, acoustic-phonetic dependencies within the syllable, higher order (nonphonetic) factors in the comprehension of fluent speech, and cerebral…

Punctuation serves as a system of visual markers that contradict previously generated false grammatical expectations. Word order conditions define the redundant or critical aspect of punctuation cues to visual display. Parsing (grouping) sentences into meaningful phrases and clauses aids language comprehension, and children who have reading…

Noting that the lack of prosodic information in printed text may be a source of difficulty for children who are learning to read, this paper explores the features of language underlying the acoustic and perceptual segmentation of sentences into meaningful units. Using evidence from studies in speech production and perception, the paper addresses…

Compares the production of speech and sign: the approaches used in research, the cognitive processes involved, and the output timing mechanism. (AM)

Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…