Linguistic tones play an important role in expressing lexical and grammatical meaning in tone languages. A small change in the pitch of a word can result in an entirely different meaning. A logical question for those who document tone languages is whether or not singers preserve linguistic tone when singing and if so, to what degree? I begin by…

We tested the prosodic hypothesis that the temporal alignment of a speaker's beat gestures in a sentence influences syntactic parsing by driving the listener's attention. Participants chose between two possible interpretations of relative-clause (RC) ambiguous sentences, while their electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. We manipulated the…

This paper creates a novel link between research on linguistics and education by discussing what we know about the sound system of heritage language users of Spanish and how these findings can inform practices implemented in heritage Spanish courses in the USA. First, we provide an overview of terminology associated with heritage language…

This dissertation examines the interface between music and language in "Huju", which is a Shanghai dialect based regional opera. Chapter I is a short introduction. Chapter II presents a thorough review of the studies on linguistic tone and music tune, and provides descriptive background information about "Huju" and Shanghai…

According to some accounts, the linguistic reality of stress-timing in English is questionable and the existence of this type of language rhythm is rejected as a perceptual illusion. In this article, the temporal characteristics of English are re-analysed in the light of current linguistic research, and a range of implications for pronunciation…

It has been widely shown that infants and adults are capable of using only prosodic information to discriminate between languages. However, it remains unclear which aspects of prosody, either rhythm or intonation, listeners attend to for language discrimination. Previous researchers have suggested that rhythm, the duration and timing of speech…

Two studies investigated the effects of prosody and pragmatic context on off-line and on-line processing of sentences like "John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today". Such sentences are ambiguous between the so-called "nongapping" reading, where "John greeted Ben", and the highly unpreferred "gapping" reading, where "Ben greeted Paul". In the…

Two experiments are reported in which the presence or absence of silence was found to be a relevant cue for the distinction between affricate and fricative when it occurred in sentence-medial position, but not when it occurred at a sentence boundary. (Author/AMH)

A study investigated the effect of pausing, a component of speech speed, on the listening comprehension of second language learners. Groups of subjects at two ability levels listened to taped versions of two brief lectures recorded with four different combinations of speed and pausing conditions. Comprehension was measured by means of cloze tests…

Analysis of the quantitative metrical verse of French Renaissance poet Jean-Antoine de Baif finds that the metrics, often seen as unscannable and using an incomprehensible phonetic orthography, derive largely from a system that is accentual, with the orthography permitting the poet to encode quantitative distinctions that coincide with the meter.…

The practice of playing taped spoken French just before the beginning of a regular foreign language class rests on the premise that regular exposure to unedited foreign speech sensitizes one to its unique intonation, rhythm, and sounds. It is hypothesized that the ability to identify a language may be the first step in listening. A review of…

A series of experiments investigated infants' perception of inherent structural organization in the prosody of utterances. The experiments used a listening preference procedure to test: perceptions of appropriate pauses in child-directed and adult-directed speech; perceptions of appropriate pauses in speech filtered for most segmental features but…

This study discusses the nature of rhythm as it may apply to speech and language, reviews some of the literature on the development of rhythm, and presents some thoughts relating these findings to specific examples of children's speech. There is evidence to support the view that one need not look at the exact rhythm of any utterance, but only for…

Six working papers on phonology, primarily concerning less commonly taught languages, are presented are in this volume. Titles include: "Non-Uniqueness Condition and the Segmentation of the Chinese Syllable" (Benjamin Ao); "Theoretical Consequences of Metathesis in Maltese" (Elizabeth Hume); "Cs and Vs or Moras: The Case…