Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their "yes/no" questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment 1, five to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the…

The pace of speech i.e. tempo can be varied to our mood of the moment. Fast speech can convey urgency, whereas slower speech can be used for emphasis. In public speaking, orators produce powerful effects by varying the loudness and pace of their speech. The juxtaposition of very loud and very quiet utterances is a device often used by those trying…

Using a non-speech-specific measure of prosody, rise time perception, Goswami and her colleagues have found that individuals with dyslexia perform significantly worse than nonimpaired readers. Studies have also found that children and adults with specific language impairment were impaired on these tasks. Despite the high comorbidity of these…