Purpose: In the context of music and speech perception, this study aimed to assess the effect of variation in one of two auditory attributes--pitch contour and timbre--on the perception of the other in prelingually deafened young cochlear implant (CI) users, and the relationship between pitch contour perception and two cognitive functions of…

The study examined storytelling prosody (i.e., prosodic variations in retelling a story) and the relation with oral language in Taiwanese preschool children. One hundred and twenty-eight preschool children aged 4 and 5 were recruited and given the following tasks: nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary, syntax, and storytelling prosody. Children's…

The Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP) is widely used in infant research. Previous studies have shown that speech perception measures obtained with HPP are related to later language skills which may make them a potential instrument for an early detection of developmental language risks. The present study assessed the reliability and stability of…

Purpose: The current study investigated English prosodic focus marking by autistic and typically developing (TD) Cantonese trilingual children, and examined the potential differences in this regard compared to native English-speaking children. Method: Forty-eight participants were recruited with 16 speakers for each of the three groups…

This study explores how young children infer nuances in epistemic modality through prosody. A forced-choice task was used, testing children's (ages three to seven) comprehension of the "might"/"will" distinction (modal condition) as well their ability to modulate the strength of "might" through two prosodic tunes…

Most orthographies contain both accented and non-accented vowels. But are they processed as variants of the same letter unit or as separate abstract units? Recent research in French has revealed that accented vowels seem to be processed as separate units. Here we examined whether this phenomenon is universal or language-specific. We chose Spanish…

Purpose: Smoothed cepstral peak prominence (CPPS) and harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR) are acoustic measures related to the periodicity, harmonicity, and noise components of an acoustic signal. To date, there is little evidence about the advantages of CPPS over HNR in voice diagnostics. Recent studies indicate that voice fundamental frequency (F0)…

When a subject NP has a singular head noun and a plural noun in some lower syntactic phrase (i.e. local noun), occasionally a plural verb will be produced in a sentence (i.e., agreement attraction) (Bock 1991,Bock et al. 2001). Evidence from production (Eberhard 2005) and comprehension (Badecker 2007, Wagers 2009) studies have conflicting accounts…

This study investigated the effects of video dubbing on EFL learners' pronunciation as well as explored their attitudes toward the technique at a private school in the Mekong Delta. A quasi-experimental design that followed a pretest-posttest group gathered both qualitative and quantitative data to address these issues. The participants are young…

We investigated how Central Swedish-speaking four to eleven-year-old children acquire the prosodic marking of narrow focus, compared to adult controls. Three measurements were analysed: placement of the prominence-marking high tone (prominence H), pitch range effects of the prominence H, and word duration. Subject-verb-object sentences were…

Referring to the "vital parts" of speech that do not appear in print, E. B. Huey (1908/1968) described prosody in reading as "the rise and fall of pitch and inflection, the hurrying here and slowing there, what we have called the melody of speech." In this paper, we discuss the role prosody plays in reading, contextualized in…

One feature of Spanish that presents some difficulties to second language (L2) learners whose first language (L1) is English concerns lexical stress. This study explores one aspect of the obstacle these learners face, weak phonological processing routines concerning stress inherited from their native language. Participants were L1 English L2…

This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like…

Prosody or "melody in speech" in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often perceived as atypical. This study examined perception and production of statements and questions in 84 children, adolescents and adults with and without ASD, as well as participants' pitch direction discrimination thresholds. The results suggested that the abilities…

Purpose: This study aims to translate the English version of the Trans Woman Voice Questionnaire (TWVQ) to simplified Chinese (TWVQ-SC) and to examine its reliability and validity. Method: Standardized translation procedures were strictly followed for the translation of the TWVQ. Two hundred sixty trans woman and 128 cis woman subjects completed…