A growing empirical research base has contributed substantially to our understanding of pronunciation instruction. A contemporary perspective entails a balanced approach featuring both the teaching of segmentals (vowels and consonants) and suprasegmentals (stress, rhythm, and intonation) while favoring intelligible (i.e. clear) pronunciation as…

Purpose: The purposes of this clinical focus article are to describe differences in expressive prosody among autistic individuals, describe the role of prosody in reading comprehension, highlight the potential contribution of prosody to the reading comprehension difficulties experienced by many autistic individuals, discuss interventions that…

Italian vowels have a shorter duration before a geminate than before a singleton consonant, but a longer duration in syllables carrying stress. We asked whether children can produce the differentiation in vowel duration in singleton/geminate contexts reported for adults and whether their production changes depending on position of primary stress.…

Reduplication, the copying operation employed in natural language morphophonology (e.g., Ilokano pluralization, [kaldin] 'goat'; [kal-kaldin] 'goats'; Hayes and Abad, 1989, p. 357), creates repetition structures within surface word forms. Though reduplication and surface repetitions have been extensively studied, two questions remain unresolved.…

Background: Effective classroom communication is key to shaping the learning environment and inspiring student engagement. And, it's not just what is said, but how it's said, that influences students. Yet, few (current or future) teachers receive education on vocal pedagogy. Aims: This study examined the impact of raising vocal awareness in…

Mandarin is a tone language that is spoken by billions of people in the world. Despite huge demand, there is a lack of assessment and treatment tools targeting Mandarin speakers with communication disorders. To better understand the speech profile of Mandarin speakers with communication disorders, this dissertation first examined contrastive…

This dissertation examines the associations between pragmatic meaning categories in English and specific realizations of prosodic prominence. It has been well-established that in Mainstream American English (MAE), prominence is often used to convey contrast. A more limited set of studies suggests that prosodic prominence may also be capable of…

Prosody is an important indicator of reading development, but many teachers are unclear about how it can help students improve their reading fluency. Beyond demonstrating expressive or flowing reading, specific components of "reading prosody" can distinctly reveal how well word recognition and comprehension processes coalesce, providing…

Autistic youth display difficulties in emotion recognition, yet little research has examined behavioral and neural indices of vocal emotion recognition (VER). The current study examines behavioral and event-related potential (N100, P200, Late Positive Potential [LPP]) indices of VER in autistic and non-autistic youth. Participants (N = 164)…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to explore the ability of Hebrew-speaking children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) to produce lexical stress. Method: A total of 36 children aged between 4 and 7 years, 18 children with CAS, and 18 typically developing (TD) children participated in the study. All children completed language and…

We examined the use of filled pauses in conversations between homogeneous pairs of autistic and non-autistic adults. A corpus of semi-spontaneous speech was used to analyse the rate, lexical type (nasal "uhm" or non-nasal "uh"), and prosodic realisation (rising, level or falling) of filled pauses. We used Bayesian modelling for…

Background: Down syndrome (DS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder of genetic origin with a cognitive-behavioural profile that distinguishes it from other syndromes. Within this profile, language difficulties are particularly marked, having been more studied in childhood than in adulthood. More generally, there is a paucity of research on the…

When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity,…

This paper examines outsourced call center interactions to illustrate how these contexts can enhance pronunciation analysis and training. Public opinion in the United States and the United Kingdom regarding the perceived "pronunciation problems" of agents based in call centers in Outer-Circle English-speaking countries is typically…

Studies into the role of audiovisual input and captions (i.e., subtitles in the same language as the audio) for L2 learning have shown that such input can positively influence L2 learners' acquisition of lexical items. Few studies have explored the effects of captioning on learners' capacity to segment the speech stream. This study investigates…