The article examines the role of infant-directed vocabulary (IDV) in infants language acquisition, specifically addressing the question of whether IDV forms that are not prominent in adult language may nonetheless be useful to the process of acquisition. Japanese IDV offers a good test case, as IDV characteristically takes a bisyllabic…

This study investigates Mandarin discourse markers from both functional and prosodic perspectives. Discourse markers are defined as sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk (Schiffrin 1987). In this study, I focus on three discourse markers, "ranhou" "then", "wo juede" "I think/feel", and…

It is generally assumed that prosodic cues that provide linguistic information, like discourse status, are driven primarily by the information structure of the conversation. This article investigates whether speakers have the capacity to adjust subtle acoustic-phonetic properties of the prosodic signal when they find themselves in contexts in…

Purpose: In this research, it is observed that if solfeggio syllables, consonants, and vowels are spoken properly, voice intensity (accent), duration, pitch (high pitch-low pitch) and intonation (the ability to carry a musical voice) related to proper pitch level. In this study, it is observed that rhythmic structures do not form without…

A word-spotting task is used in Spanish to test the way in which polysyllabic letter-strings are parsed in this language. Monosyllabic words (e.g., "bar") embedded at the beginning of a pseudoword were immediately followed by either a coda-forming consonant (e.g., "barto") or a vowel (e.g., "baros"). In the former…

Studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a first language do not agree on the patterns and factors relevant for coda development. In order to shed light on the questions involved, a longitudinal study of coda development in Northern European Spanish was carried out to explore the relationship between accuracy, markedness and frequency. The study…

This study investigates how children acquire prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese. Using a picture-matching game, we elicited spontaneous production of sentences in various focus conditions from children aged four to eleven. We found that Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use some pitch-related cues in some tones and duration in all tones…

Many approaches to early word learning posit that children assume a one-to-one mapping of form and meaning. However, children's early vocabularies contain homophones, words that violate that assumption. Children might learn such words by exploiting prosodic differences between homophone meanings that are associated with lemma frequency (Gahl,…

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…

This study tests the hypothesis that late first-language English / second-language Spanish learners (L1 English / L2 Spanish learners) acquire spirantization in stages according to the prosodic hierarchy (Zampini, 1997, 1998). In Spanish, voiced stops [b d g] surface after a pause or nasal stop, and continuants [ß? ð? ??] surface postvocalically,…

Infants perceive intonation contrasts early in development in contrast to lexical stress but similarly to lexical pitch accent. Previous studies have mostly focused on pitch height/direction contrasts; however, languages use a variety of pitch features to signal meaning, including differences in pitch timing. In this study, we investigate infants'…

The purpose of this study was to compare the reading skills of the fourth graders who were poor readers in different text genres (story and informative text). Fifty-six fourth-grade students who were poor readers participated in this study. Reading rates, reading errors and reading prosody characteristics of the students were examined in the…

Although significant attention has been devoted to prosody in discourse production, relatively little is known about prosody's effect on discourse interpretation. This article explores the ability of synthetic manipulations of prosody to bias interpretation of discourse ambiguities where a first sentence is linked to two following sentences either…

This study investigates interpersonal processes underlying dialog by comparing two approaches, "interactive alignment" and "interpersonal synergy", and assesses how they predict collective performance in a joint task. While the interactive alignment approach highlights imitative patterns between interlocutors, the synergy…

This study investigates 3- to 5-year-old children's sensitivity to lexical, intonational and gestural information in the comprehension of speaker uncertainty. Most previous studies on children's understanding of speaker certainty and uncertainty across languages have focused on the comprehension of lexical markers, and little is known about the…