Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate cortical tracking of speech (CTS) in adults who stutter (AWS) compared to typically fluent adults (TFAs) to test the involvement of the speech-motor network in tracking rhythmic speech information. Method: Participants' electroencephalogram was recorded while they simply listened to sentences…

This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in light of sex differences in the pace of language development. Fifty-three 3- to 5-year-old boys and girls learned pairs of novel words with contrasting…

Purpose: Humans have a near-automatic tendency to entrain their motor actions to rhythms in the environment. Entrainment has been hypothesized to play an important role in processing naturalistic stimuli, such as speech and music, which have intrinsically rhythmic properties. Here, we studied two facets of entraining one's rhythmic motor actions…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of written cues on the second- language (L2) language perception, processing, and word learning, especially when the person's first language (L1) belongs to a different rhythmic type of language than L2. The first objective was to examine whether late bilinguals as L2 learners can benefit more from…

The ability to understand and convey one's thoughts and emotions through spoken language is important for successful communication. The prosody of spoken language, including the intonation, rhythm, and stress present in speech, is important for language acquisition, language comprehension, and communication (Mehler et al., 1988; Nazzi, Bertoncini,…

Speech utterances are more than the linear concatenation of individual phonemes or words. They are organized by prosodic structures comprising phonological units of different sizes (e.g., syllable, foot, word, and phrase) and the prominence relations among them. As the linguistic structure of spoken languages, prosody serves an important function…

Speakers employ acoustic cues (pitch accents) to indicate that a word is important, but may also use visual cues (beat gestures, head nods, eyebrow movements) for this purpose. Even though these acoustic and visual cues are related, the exact nature of this relationship is far from well understood. We investigate whether producing a visual beat…

Models of stuttering and delayed auditory feedback propose that, in these conditions, the rhythmic structure of fluent speech prespecifing the intervals between vowels of stressed syllables is lacking and that auditory perception of vowels of stressed syllables is predicted incorrectly. A model regarding onset of stuttering in children is also…

Research is reported in which subjects were required to perceive sentences in noise. A series of sentences having the same syntax and rhythm was presented. On a final sentence either rhythm alone or rhythm plus syntax were changed. The results stress the importance of rhythm in speech perception. (Author/RM)

This study treats the child's vocal and rhythmic development immediately subsequent to birth and forward, and shows how this development relates to musical learning. (Author)

The author states that phonetic symbolism is not a generalizable phenomenon but maintains that those interested in the status of a poem as a speech event need not totally discount or discredit such perceptions. In his discussion of the theories which ascribe meaning to vocal utterance--the two imitative theories, the onomatopoeic and the gestural,…

This book serves as a guide for the native and non-native speaker of English in overcoming various problems in articulation, rhythm, and intonation. It is also useful in group therapy speech programs. Forty-five practice chapters offer drill materials for all the vowels, diphthongs, and consonants of American English plus English stress and…