In many domains, learners extract recurring units from continuous sequences. For example, in unknown languages, fluent speech is perceived as a continuous signal. Learners need to extract the underlying words from this continuous signal and then memorize them. One prominent candidate mechanism is statistical learning, whereby learners track how…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also…

The paper focuses on the vers libre prosody taking into account the auditory aspect of its oral actualisation. The main hypothesis of the study is that vers libre is constituted with a range of definite stable prosodic features that allow referring it to versification and at the same time to something different from a metered text and prose.…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit disordered speech prosody, but sources of disordered prosody remain poorly understood. We explored patterns of temporal alignment and prosodic grouping in a speech-based metronome repetition task as well as manual coordination in a drum tapping task among Cantonese speakers with ASD and…

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…

Literature on speech rhythm has been focused on three major questions: whether languages have rhythms that can be classified into a small number of types, what the criteria are for the membership in each class, and whether the perceived rhythmic similarity between languages can be quantified based on properties found in the speech signal. Claims…

The goal of this study was to determine which linguistic aspects of second language speech are related to accent and which to comprehensibility. To address this goal, 19 different speech measures in the oral productions of 40 native French speakers of English were examined in relation to accent and comprehensibility, as rated by 60 novice raters…

English rhythm is related to contrast between the stressed and the unstressed in duration structure. In native English speech, in general, an intra-speaker average duration of stressed syllable is longer than that of syllable as a whole. On the contrary, that of unstressed syllable is shorter than that of syllable as a whole. In the previous paper…

To improve more effectively the learners' proficiency to control contrast of the stressed to the unstressed in English teaching, it is necessary to analyze how the acoustical characteristics of learners' speech are related to the perceptual evaluation by teachers. This paper analyzes A) learner characteristics of durations measured in speech units…

Prosodic information, such as word stress and speech rhythm, is important in language acquisition, and sensitivity to stress patterns is present from birth onwards. Exposure to prosodic properties of the native language occurs prenatally. Preterm birth and an associated lack of exposure to prosodic information are suspected to affect language…