This qualitative study aims at exploring the internal structure of personal experience oral narrative in Arabic in terms of Woodbury (1987) rhetorical components and Labov (1972) approach of narrative structure, who claimed its presence in all well-formed narratives. Recordings of orally told narratives by five Saudi informants were elicited in…

Perceptual grouping is fundamental to many auditory processes. The Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL) is a default grouping strategy, where rhythmic alternations of duration are perceived iambically (weak-strong), while alternations of intensity are perceived trochaically (strong-weak). Some argue that the ITL is experience dependent. For instance, French…

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…

This dissertation aims to extend our knowledge of prosody--in particular, what kinds of information may be conveyed through prosody, which prosodic dimensions may be used to convey them, and how individual speakers differ from one another in how they use prosody. Four production studies were conducted to examine how various factors interact with…

Two eye-tracking experiments tested how pitch prominence on a prenominal adjective affects contrast resolution in Japanese adult and 6-year old listeners. Participants located two animals in succession on displays with multiple colored animals. In Experiment 1, adults' fixations to the contrastive target (pink cat [right arrow] GREEN cat) were…

Sarcasm, or sarcastic irony, involves expressing a message that is often opposite of the literal meaning of what is being said, in a way that may sound bitter, or caustic (Gibbs, 1986). In the past, sarcasm has been viewed as a method of introducing the possibility of alternative interpretations of a discourse, by creating ambiguity as to the…

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent…

Reading with an adult plays an important role in developing children's oral language skills, phonological awareness and print knowledge. Parental reading aloud is also an indicator of children's later academic success, which suggests that the practice may be further linked to children's development of broader academic skills and behaviour, such as…

In spoken language comprehension, syntactic parsing decisions interact with prosodic phrasing, which is directly affected by phrase length. Here we used ERPs to examine whether a similar effect holds for the on-line processing of written sentences during silent reading, as suggested by theories of "implicit prosody." Ambiguous Korean sentence…

Function (i.e., grammatical) words very frequently lack word-level stress and display phonetic reduction relative to content (i.e., lexical) words. However, word-class (function vs . content) may not be the only factor that affects phonetic realization of function words; prosodic and syntactic context can also play a significant role in…

A study of the phonetics of everyday conversational interaction looked specifically at the occurrence of the "oh" particle, a signal of the receipt of new information. Focus was on the phonetic characteristics of the "oh" utterance in this context. Data were drawn from British and American recorded telephone conversations. It was observed that…

Describes several experiments which examined the basic claims of metrical phonology. The first two experiments examined the possible influences of stress clash in speech timing. The third and fourth experiments tested Hayes's (1984) analysis rule of quadrisyllabic meter; the fifth experiment included a basic test of the stress clash notion. (SED)

This study shows that utterances ending in an extra-clausal response particle provide interesting evidence in favor of the hypothesis that theme-rheme articulation in Norwegian utterances is grammatically underdetermined. First, a review of the approach used in the study of the functions of Norwegian intonational phrasing is provided. In this…

Pronunciation is reexamined from a "top-down" perspective that shifts the focus of attention in language instruction from individual phonemes to suprasegmentals and other features of the larger context of utterances, including prosody, phonological fluency, voice quality, and gestures. (57 references) (Author/LB)

The concept of "prominence" in intonation is discussed. It treats the prominence of a syllable as a feature determined by the speaker separate from the word itself, and meaningful in and of itself. The decision by a speaker to assign or not assign prominence to a syllable (selectivity) is seen as related to the immediacy of spoken…