This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

We tested whether adult listeners can simultaneously keep track of variations in pitch and syllable duration in order to segment continuous speech into phrases and group these phrases into sentences. The speech stream was constructed so that prosodic cues signaled hierarchical structures (i.e., phrases embedded within sentences) and non-adjacent…

This dissertation investigates how the Taiwanese Tone Sandhi Groups are perceived, and the acoustic/phonetics correlates of listeners' judgments. A series of perception experiments have been conducted to scrutinize the following topics--Taiwanese tone neutralization, Tone Sandhi Group (TSG) as a prosodic domain, perceived boundary strength in…

The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs.…

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…

Describes a study which examines the relationship between context redundancy and keyword intelligibility in sentences having both high and low redundancy. Word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. (SED)

Recent studies of rising intonation contours in French, in particular the acoustical differences that serve to distinguish Yes/No questions from other rising intonations are reviewed. The preliminary results of a pilot study of rising intonations in French, in which average curves were obtained from spectrographic measurements of fundamental…