Friday sermons portray patterns of lexical cohesion which can demonstrate how effective communication is achieved. This study proposes a model of lexical cohesion that fits the spoken discourse of Friday sermons in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To that end, a corpus of 25 sermons was analyzed to identify patterns of cohesion and show the impact…

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 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…

The effects of repeated oral reading and timed reading on L2 oral reading fluency were examined among Japanese university students (N = 50) over 12 weeks. Three quasi-experimental groups were used in the study. Group 1 practiced two types of reading: Repeated oral reading with chunking practice and timed reading. Group 2 did timed reading only.…

A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of…

In addition to the phrase-final accent (FA), the French phonological system includes a phonetically distinct Initial Accent (IA). The present study tested two proposals: that IA marks the onset of phonological phrases, and that it has an independent rhythmic function. Eight adult native speakers of French were instructed to read syntactically…

This paper focuses on linguistic prosodic units related to boundaries between syntactic units. Specifically, rules for predicting the location of such boundaries, and factors affecting their location, are discussed. Examples are given on how prosodies can be used for syntactic analysis. Addressing the question of prosodic units and their…

Parsing sentences into meaningful phrases and clauses is an essential step in language comprehension, and parsing difficulty is a common reading problem. Prosody (intonation, stress, and rhythm) provides information about phrase and clause boundaries in spoken language that is not available in written language. In an experiment to test whether…

A collection of papers on linguistics includes: "Italian Comparatives of Inequality with 'Che' and 'Di'" (Adrian C. Battye); "A Note on Passives in GPSG [Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar]" (Robert D. Borsley); "Reduplicated Constructions in Chinese and Questions of Generative Power" (Jonathan Calder); "A Note on Subcategorization, Constituent…

This paper examines certain of the cues to surface constituency that are salient to children in the comprehension of syntactic structure. Accessibility is studied through a set of experiments requiring seven-year-old children to repeat certain syntactic constituents. These children can correctly identify subjects and also predicate phrases with…