The present linguistic analyses of two children (aged 8 and 10) with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and their two matched controls are based on dyadic therapist-child conversations and on picture description tasks. The circa 100 analysis features covering aspects of (i) lexicon (e.g. prominalization), (ii) structural characteristics of turns, (iii)…

Suprasegmentals have been emphasized in ESL/EFL pedagogy since the advent of communicative language teaching. However, it is still unclear how individual suprasegmental features affect listeners' judgments of non-native speakers' accented speech. The current study began to specify relative weights of individual temporal and prosodic features for…

An adaptation of the standard battery of Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Cognitive Abilities (WJ-III) for Brazilian children and youth was investigated. The sample was composed of 1094 students (54 percent girls), ages 7-17, living in Sao Paulo state (91 percent). Items from Brazilian school books as well as from the WJ-III Spanish version…

It has been widely shown that infants and adults are capable of using only prosodic information to discriminate between languages. However, it remains unclear which aspects of prosody, either rhythm or intonation, listeners attend to for language discrimination. Previous researchers have suggested that rhythm, the duration and timing of speech…

This study investigated the effects of first language prosodic transfer on the perception and production of English lexical stress and the relation between stress perception and production by second language learners. To test the effect of Thai tonal distribution rules and stress patterns on native Thai speakers' perception and production of…

This study reports an exploratory analysis of the age of arrival (AoA) effect on the production of second language (L2) prosody. Three groups of Mandarin-speaking immigrants (N = 10 in each group) with varying AoA in the United States and ten native speakers of English as controls participated in the study. All participants read a paragraph of…

This dissertation takes a Minimalist approach to phonology, treating the phonological module as a system of abstract symbolic computation, divorced from phonetic content. I investigate the position of the phonological module within the architecture of grammar and the evolutionary scenario developed by Hauser et al. (2002a) and Fitch et al. (2005).…

During the first year of life, infants begin to have difficulties perceiving non-native vowel and consonant contrasts, thus adapting their perception to the phonetic categories of the target language. In this paper, we examine the perception of a non-segmental feature, i.e. stress. Previous research with adults has shown that speakers of French (a…

Purpose: To compare the perceived articulation rate of boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS) with that of chronologically age-matched (CA) boys and to determine segmental and/or prosodic factors that account for perceived rate. Method: Ten listeners used direct magnitude estimation procedures to judge the articulation rates of 7 boys with FXS only, 5…

Early prosodic development (f[subscript 0] variation) was systematically measured in Mandarin-learning infants at the transition from babbling to producing first words. Spontaneous vocalizations of twenty-four infants aged 0;7 to 1;6 were recorded in 45-minute sessions. The speech production of twenty-four caregivers was also audio-recorded during…

This paper reports on a rare phenomenon in language development--the production of words without consonants, and thus syllables without an onset. Such words, which are referred as Consonant-free words (CFWs), appeared for a short period in the early speech of hearing impaired Hebrew-speaking children, who produced words consisting of one or two…

Systematic differences among regional U.S. English speech are recognizable to native speakers to varying degrees. This has been demonstrated by researchers in perceptual dialectology who ask listeners to match a speaker to his or her dialect region. Machines have also been able to identify the regional origin of a speaker to some degree, although…

Over the past decade, fluent reading has come to be seen as a central component of skilled reading and a driving force in the literacy curriculum. However, much of this focus has centered on a relatively narrow definition of reading fluency, one that emphasizes automatic word recognition. This article attempts to expand this understanding by…

This study investigated identification of fragmented Mandarin tones by non-native listeners. Monosyllabic Mandarin words were digitally processed to generate intact, silent-center, center-only, and onset-only syllables. The syllables were recorded with two carrier phrases such that the offset of the carrier tone and the onset of the target tone…

Purpose: This study was aimed at determining the role of prosody and situational context in children's understanding of expressive utterances. Which one of these 2 cues will help children grasp the speaker's intention? Do children exhibit a "contextual bias" whereby they ignore prosody, such as the "lexical bias" found in other studies (M. Friend…