Two member onset consonant clusters with /s/ as the first member (#sC onsets) behave differently from other double onset consonant clusters in English. Phonological explanations of children's consonant cluster production have been posited to predict children's speech acquisition. The aim of this study was to consider the role of the Sonority…

The purpose of the current study is to document phonological change from a multidimensional perspective for a 3-year-old boy with phonological disorder by comparing three measures: (1) accuracy of consonant productions, (2) dynamic assessment, and (3) acoustic analysis. The methods included collecting a sample of the targets /s, [image omitted],…

In this study I investigate the impact of different characteristics of the L2 speech signal on the intelligibility of L2 speakers of English to native listeners. Three native listeners were observed and questioned as they orthographically transcribed utterances taken from connected conversational speech produced by three L2 speakers from different…

The mathematical models of intonation used in speech technology are often inaccessible to linguists. By the same token, phonological descriptions of intonation are rarely used by speech technologists, as they cannot be implemented directly in applications. Consequently, these research communities do not benefit much from each other's insights. In…

This paper investigates stress assignment in Dutch aphasic patients in non-word repetition, as well as in real-word and non-word reading. Performance on the non-word reading task was similar for the aphasic patients and the control group, as mainly regular stress was assigned to the targets. However, there were group differences on the real-word…

A high-amplitude sucking procedure, with synthesized female speech, was used to ascertain the effects of fundamental frequency, amplitude, and duration on discrimination of polysyllabic sequences. Results suggest that the exaggerated suprasegmentals of infant-directed speech may function as a perceptual catalyst, focusing the infant's attention on…

Results of a study involving eight Down's Syndrome Ss (two to three years old) revealed no overall relationship between Ss's imitation performance in a prosodic task and in a task using speech sounds as stimuli. (CL)

Ten 5-year-old children with adequate articulation skills and ten children (also 5 years old) with inadequate articulation skills were administered the Templin/Darley Test of Articulation and the Test of Rhythm and Intonation Patterns (TRIP) to compare the ability of the two groups to imitate suprasegmental patterns. (Author/PHR)

Investigated whether current approaches to automatically classifying dialog acts (DAs) in natural conversation could be improved by adding prosodic information. Using conversations from the switchboard corpus, researchers annotated DAs, automatically extracting prosodic features for each DA. Results indicated that DAs are redundantly marked in…

Using evidence from first-hand experimental work and existing studies, Colantoni and Gurlekian take a tentative but encouraging step towards exploring the role of contact in explaining intonational change. Their central question is whether Buenos Aires Spanish intonation is distinctive relative to other varieties of Spanish; and if so, whether…

The objectives of this study are (a) to determine if native speakers of Canadian French at different English proficiencies can use primary stress for recognizing English words and (b) to specify how the second language (L2) learners' (surface-level) knowledge of L2 stress placement influences their use of primary stress in L2 word recognition. Two…

This paper investigates the relationship between ability to detect changes in prosody and reading performance in Spanish. Participants were children aged 7-8 years. Their tasks consisted of reading words, reading non-words, stressing non-words and reproducing sequences of two, three or four non-words by pressing the corresponding keys on the…

This study examined second language (L2) experience effects on children's acquisition of fluency-(speech rate, frequency, and duration of pausing) and prosody-based (stress timing, peak alignment) suprasegmentals. Twenty Korean children (age of arrival in the United States = 7-11 years, length of US residence = 1 vs. 11 years) and 20 age-matched…

In this study we examined syntactic ambiguity resolution in two different Chinese languages, Cantonese and Mandarin, which are relatively similar grammatically but very different phonologically. We did this using four-character sentences that could be read using two, two-syllable sequences (2-2) or a structure where the first syllable could be…

We examined 7-month-old infants' processing of emotionally congruent and incongruent face-voice pairs using ERP measures. Infants watched facial expressions (happy or angry) and, after a delay of 400 ms, heard a word spoken with a prosody that was either emotionally congruent or incongruent with the face being presented. The ERP data revealed that…