Well-documented Romance-Germanic differences in the use of accent in speech to convey information-structure and focus cause problems for the assessment of prosodic skills in populations with clinical disorders. The strategies for assessing the ability to use lexical and contrastive accent in English and Spanish are reviewed, and studies in the…

With research showing the benefits of pronunciation instruction aimed at suprasegmentals (Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1997, 1998; Derwing & Rossiter, 2003; Hahn, 2004; McNerney and Mendelsohn, 1992), more materials are needed to provide learners opportunities for self-directed practice. A 13-week experimental study was performed with 75 ESL learners…

Phonological acquisition traditionally has been measured using constructs that focus on segments rather than the whole words. Findings from recent research have suggested whole-word productions be evaluated using measures such as phonological mean length of utterance (pMLU) and the proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP). These measures have been…

A number of studies have shown that bilingual children have an advantage when performing on phonological awareness tasks, particularly in their stronger language. Little research has been done to date, examining the effects of bilingualism on both languages of bilingual children. In this study Mandarin-English bilingual children's performance on…

Adele Miccio recognized the paucity of information on the phonological development of children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and emphasized the need to apply advances in bilingual phonological research toward an appropriate phonological measure for bilingual children. In the spirit of her pioneering work, the present study…

Pitch is a psychoacoustic construct crucial in the production and perception of speech and songs. This article is an exploration of the interface of speech and song performance of Chinese speakers. Although parallels might be drawn from the prosodic and sound structures of the linguistic and musical systems, perceiving and producing speech and…

Investigates syntactic and prosodic features of speakers' speech at points where turn-taking and backchannels occur, focusing on an analysis of Japanese spontaneous dialogs. The study shows that in both turn-taking and backchannels, some instances of syntactic features make extremely strong contributions, and syntax has a stronger contribution…

This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast ("covert contrast"). This study presents evidence…

Learners of English as a foreign/Second Language (EFL/ESL) can easily learn the correct pronunciation of English words, some linguists have tried to simplify English phonology in general, and English accent in particular, over the past 50 years or so; some scholars have talked about four degrees of primary, secondary, tertiary and weak stress…

In spoken English, pitch accents can convey the focus associated with new or contrasted constituents. Two listening experiments were conducted to determine whether accenting a subject makes its predicate a more tempting antecedent for an elided verb phrase, presumably because the accent helps focus the subject of the antecedent clause, increasing…

Several studies have shown that the stress pattern of one's native language is applied to new linguistic stimuli. Regarding the segmentation of artificial synthesized speech, this idea has been supported by experiments with languages where the stress pattern coincides with word boundaries (i.e. English, Finnish and Dutch). In this study, we…

Little research has been conducted on the development of suprasegmental characteristics of vocalizations in typically developing infants (TDI) and the role of audition in the development of these characteristics. The purpose of the present study was to examine the longitudinal development of fundamental frequency (F[subscript 0]) in eight TDI and…

Approaches prosody as one set of resources and practices among many by which participants interactively produce conversation and other talk-in interaction, examining three episodes of conversation that exemplify different orders of organization in which prosodic practices may be implicated. Reflects on what is needed for students of conversation…

Investigated the functions of dynamic speech rates as contextualization cues in conversational Japanese, examining five spontaneous task-oriented dialogs and analyzing the potential of speech-rate changes in signaling the structure of the information being exchanged. Results found a correlation between speech decelerations and the openings of new…

Affective (emotional) prosody is a neuropsychological function that encompasses non-verbal aspects of language that are necessary for recognizing and conveying emotions in communication, whereas non-affective (linguistic) prosody indicates whether the sentence is a question, an order or a statement. Considerable evidence points to a dominant role…