Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as…

Many people with the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (AS) show poorly developed skills in understanding emotional messages. The present study addressed discrimination of speech prosody in children with AS at neurophysiological level. Detection of affective prosody was investigated in one-word utterances as indexed by the N1 and the mismatch…

Greek is a language with lexical stress that marks stress orthographically with a special diacritic. Thus, the orthography and the lexicon constitute potential sources of stress assignment information in addition to any possible general default metrical pattern. Here, we report two experiments with secondary education children reading aloud…

Hemispheric contributions to the processing of emotional speech prosody were investigated by comparing adults with a focal lesion involving the right (n=9) or left (n=11) hemisphere and adults without brain damage (n=12). Participants listened to semantically anomalous utterances in three conditions ("discrimination," "identification," and…

This article examines the constraints on Prosodic Word production in Spanish by three monolingual and three Spanish-German bilingual children from the beginning of word production until 2;2. It also considers the relationship between Prosodic Words and Phonological Phrases, and in the case of monosyllabic words, it takes into consideration…

The role of prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension was investigated by means of three different tasks, namely auditory word monitoring (Experiment 1), self-paced reading (Experiment 2) and cross-modal comparison (Experiment 3). In all three experiments a critical prosodic unit or frame comprising a determiner, a noun and a Prepositional…

This paper begins by distinguishing phonology (the study of the systematic nature of the inter-relations of sounds in a language) from phonetics (the attempt to describe completely all the physical properties of an utterance). It is shown how in any language some properties of sounds are intuitively more relevant to the grammar and functioning of…

Analysis of the reinforcing value of verbally presented stories for autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children (total N=32) suggested that mentally retarded (but not autistic) children could use prosodic cues in expressive language and that linguistic stimuli had less reinforcement value for autistic and mentally retarded children than for…

Traces the development of punctuation and the understanding of its role over the centuries. Throughout its existence, punctuation has played the dual role of recording prosodic contours and syntactic structure. Past research and discussion has not provided a coherent picture. A model of punctuation based on systematic observation is needed. (175…

Several descriptions of the transition from single to multiword utterances use prosody as an important diagnostic criterion. For example, in contrast to successive single-word utterances, [lsquo ]real[rsquo ] two-word utterances are supposed to be characterized by a unifying intonation contour and a lack of an intervening pause. Research on the…

The study to be reported in this paper examined the work accomplished by "mm" and "mm hm" in the interactions of a parent and his daughter aged 0;10-2;0. Using the findings of Gardner (2001) for adults, the analysis shows that "mm" accomplished a range of functions based on its sequential placement and prosodic features, whereas "mm hm" was much…

The aim of the current study was to investigate expressive affect in children with Williams syndrome (WS) in comparison to typically developing children in an experimental task and in spontaneous speech. Fourteen children with WS, 14 typically developing children matched to the WS group for receptive language (LA) and 15 typically developing…

In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that those errors in immediate serial recall (ISR) that are attributable to phonological confusability share a locus with segmental errors in normal speech production. In the first two experiments, speech errors were elicited in the repeated paced reading of six-letter lists. The errors mirrored the…

The present study was designed to examine the production of the Swedish tonal accents in children with language impairment and normal controls in order to verify previous findings. The productions of 25 children with linguistic impairment and their matched controls, aged 4; 4-10; 0 (mean age 5;11) were evaluated by ratings of fundamental frequency…

The assignment of stress when reading Greek can be based on lexical and orthographic information. One hundred and seventy seventh-grade children read lists of isolated words and pseudowords. A large proportion of stress assignment errors were made in pseudoword reading, especially on the items that do not follow the most frequent penultimate…