Research into pronunciation has often disregarded its potential to inform pedagogy. This is due partly to the historical development of pronunciation teaching and research, but its effect is that there is often a mismatch between research and teaching. This paper looks at four areas in which the (mis)match is imperfect but in which a greater…

Purpose: To date, the literature on perception of affective, pragmatic, and grammatical prosody abilities in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been sparse and contradictory. It is interesting to note that the primary perception of syllable stress within the word structure, which is crucial for all prosody functions, remains relatively unexplored…

One of the first challenges facing the young language learner is the task of segmenting words from a natural language speech stream, without prior knowledge of how these words sound. Studies with younger children find that children find it easier to segment words from fluent speech when the words are presented in infant-directed speech, i.e., the…

Traditional assessments of public speaking skills rely on human scoring. We report an initial study on the development of an automated scoring model for public speaking performances using multimodal technologies. Task design, rubric development, and human rating were conducted according to standards in educational assessment. An initial corpus of…

In the present study, we examined patterns of code-focused emergent literacy skill growth for children from lower and higher socioeconomic (SES) families enrolled at a high-quality early childhood center. Measures of letter name knowledge, letter sound knowledge, alliteration, and rhyming were collected at three time points over the course of the…

Most of us have read Dale Carnegie's classic "How to make friends and influence people" in which he reveals the secret of human psychology: giving people the "feeling of importance" that they seek. He claims in that work that people feel more friendly toward those who allows them this feeling by caring about them and showing…

This study explores the most perceivable phonological features of Hong Kong (HK) L2 English speakers and how they affect the perception of HK L2 English speech from the perspective of both native and non-native English listeners. Conversational interviews were conducted to collect speech data from 20 HK speakers of English and 10 native speakers…

The concept of semantic prosody has attracted great research interest in language teaching. Identifying learners' perception of semantic prosody and collocation may be beneficial to vocabulary teaching. This study analyzes two pairs of synonyms in English writings of Chinese students and English native speakers based on the ICNALE corpus. The…

This study examines the relationship between German second language (L2) learners' awareness of the German lexical stress assignment system and their ability to accurately assign stress to cognate words with predictable lexical stress. Participants were 31 adult L2 German learners from three groups: native English speakers with a range of German…

Purpose: Research has shown that observing hand gestures mimicking pitch movements or rhythmic patterns can improve the learning of second language (L2) suprasegmental features. However, less is known about the effects of hand gestures on the learning of novel phonemic contrasts. This study examines (a) whether hand gestures mimicking phonetic…

Background: The current study explored the effect of implicit prosody on syntactic parsing in the silent reading of an ambiguous double prepositional phrase (PP) construction in Hebrew by employing the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis test (Fodor, 2002). Method: The parsing preferences of the construction in silent reading were tested and compared to…

This work attempts to investigate the role of prosody in the syntax of focus in Bangla. The aim of this study is to show the intonation pattern of Bangla in emphasis and focus. In order to do that, the author has looked at the pattern of focus without-i/o as well as with the same. Do they really pose any different focus intonation pattern from…

The purposes of the study were to determine whether third grade children mark linguistic focus features in their reading prosody and whether strong marking of these linguistic focus features might comprise an aspect of expressive reading typical of skilled, fluent reading. Children read a passage targeting information focusing aspects of prosody…

The present experiments tested bilingual infants' developmental narrowing for the interpretation of sounds that form words. These studies addressed how language specialization proceeds when the environment provides varied and divergent input. Experiment 1 (N = 32) demonstrated that bilingual 14- and 19-month-olds learned a pair of object labels…

Within the first year of life, infants learn to segment words from fluent speech. Previous research has shown that infants at 0;7·5 can segment consonant-initial words, yet the ability to segment vowel-initial words does not emerge until the age of 1;1-1;4 (0;11 in some restricted cases). In five experiments, we show that infants aged 0;11 but not…