This dissertation deals with the perception of the aspirated coda /s/ by Spanish L2 learners. Second language research, with some exceptions, focuses on whether L1English-L2 Spanish learners can perceive the aspirated variant, showing that only advanced learners with time spent in s-weakening regions succeed at the task. L2 studies about…

Background: Individuals with affective-prosodic deficits have difficulty understanding or expressing emotions and attitudes through prosody. Affective prosody disorders can occur in multiple neurological conditions, but the limited knowledge about the clinical groups prone to deficits complicates their identification in clinical settings.…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate infants' listening preference for emotional prosodies in spoken words and identify their acoustic correlates. Method: Forty-six 3- to-12-month-old infants (M[subscript age] = 7.6 months) completed a central fixation (or look-to-listen) paradigm in which four emotional prosodies (happy, sad, angry,…

This dissertation is about implicit prosody, the prosodic structure that readers assign during silent reading. The dissertation has several goals: determining which reading tasks are appropriate for studying implicit prosody, establishing how grammatical principles could guide incremental assignment of prosodic structure, and investigating how…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to examine whether there is a listening preference for child-directed speech (CDS) over backward speech in moderate-preterm infants (MPIs). Method: Eighteen MPIs of gestational age of 32.0 weeks (range: 32-34.06 weeks), chronological age of 8.09 months, and maturation age of 6.48 months served as the…

This conversation analytic study offers an empirical analysis of the Japanese turn-initial interjection "are." The interjectional "are" is said to be pragmatized from its use as a distal demonstrative and has been considered as an expression of a speaker's internal state of being surprised at something. In contrast, this study…

Background: Maternal input plays an important role in influencing linguistic development during the first years of life, and it is evident that mothers adapt their language according to their child's characteristics. Recently, it was demonstrated that maternal input addressed to children with sex chromosome trisomies (SCTs) at 8 months of age is…

In this dissertation, I investigate how people navigate ambiguity in everyday speech, with a focus on quantifier-negation sentences. Combining corpus analysis, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling in the Rational Speech Act framework, I explore preferred interpretations of quantifier-negation and examine the contexts and prosodies…

This article describes a simple method to teach pitch, a feature common to both word stress and intonation. The technique can be used by native and nonnative English-speaking teachers and is applicable to students of different levels and language backgrounds. Pronounced as /m/, "mmm" is a sound that should be easy for speakers of any…

Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate…

Word stress instruction has increasingly become a focus among EFL teachers. Owing to the phonological differences between the learner's first language and English, EFL learners of different nationalities encounter varying degrees of difficulty when pronouncing English polysyllabic words. The majority of EFL students studying medicine tend to find…

There are contradictory findings in the literature about prosodic sensitivity's contribution to reading. In this study, we examined whether prosodic sensitivity makes a unique contribution to different reading outcomes in German after controlling for the effects of phonological awareness. Word reading, nonword reading and sentence reading as well…

This study examined how toddler looking to a discourse referent is mediated by the information status of the referent and the pitch contour of the referring expression. Eighteen-month-olds saw a short discourse of three sets of images with the proportion of looking time to a target analyzed during the final image. At test, the information status…

Purpose: The objective of this study was to determine if and how the subcortical neural representation of pitch cues in listeners with normal hearing is affected by systematic manipulation of vocoder parameters. Method: This study assessed the effects of temporal envelope cutoff frequency (50 and 500 Hz), number of channels (1-32), and carrier…

Despite having different semantic profiles, near synonyms are usually presented in dictionaries as being contextually interchangeable, which may lead EFL learners to assume their contextual interchangeability. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies on how near synonyms are similar or different in their semantic and grammatical preferences.…