Examines previously published experimental work on rhythm of spoken Spanish to establish whether or not Spanish is a "syllable-timed" language. Analyzes figures from the experiments and concludes that Spanish is neither stress-timed nor syllable-timed, displaying an antirhythmic pattern where each segment has a "standard duration" dependent on its…

Presents experimental evidence supporting the assertion that successive single-word utterances share certain suprasegmental characteristics with multiple-word utterances and that they are therefore not single words but the first manifestation of syntax in speech. (AM)

This study examined 18 22-to-34-month-old children's truncation patterns in multisyllabic words. In strong-weak-strong-weak and strong-weak-weak words, final unstressed syllables were more frequently preserved than nonfinal unstressed syllables. Results revealed a significant stress pattern effect on truncation rate and support the interaction…

The study examined the relationship between 28 segmental and suprasegmental acoustic parameters of speech production and measures of speech intelligibility for 40 severely to profoundly hearing-impaired persons (mean age 21 years). Findings support the tractability of employing selected acoustic variables for the estimation of speech…

Naturalistic and experimental study of the extent to which the use of the vocal prosody typical of motherese improved the responsiveness of children with severe developmental delays suggested that the use of such vocal prosody could help remediate unresponsiveness in severely handicapped learners. (RH)

Arguing that the question of social acceptability of allophonic variations is not a linguistic issue, but rather an issue of social identity, the discussion considers the speech chain, language as a social activity with its "norms" for social acceptability, and the specific context where Singaporean English is a marker of social…

Features associated with the production of linguistic prosody were investigated in seven young speech-disordered children and seven young children with age-appropriate speech abilities. The primary differences between groups were in time characteristics of imitated responses. Results are discussed in terms of physiologic and/or linguistic…

Infants heard sentences in which prosodic structure was either consistent or inconsistent with the syntactic structure. Results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure and that learners must engage in active inferential processes to arrive at the correct syntactic…

Examined Dutch listeners' use of suprasegmental information in spoken-word recognition. Isolated syllables exised from minimal stress pairs such as "VOORnaam/voorNAAM" could be reliably assigned to their source words. Results indicate that Dutch listeners effectively exploit suprasegmental cues in recognizing spoken words. (Author/VWL)

Prosodic abnormality is common in the dysarthria associated with traumatic brain injury (TBI), and adjustments of speaking rate and emphatic stress are often used as steps in treating the speech disorder in patients with TBI-induced dysarthria. However, studies to date do not present a clear and detailed picture of how speaking rate and emphatic…

This study investigates whether or not the representation of lexical stress information can be primed during speech production. In four experiments, we attempted to prime the stress position of bisyllabic target nouns (picture names) having initial and final stress with auditory prime words having either the same or different stress as the target…

Studies of prosodic control in severe dysarthria (DYS) have focused on differences between impaired and nonimpaired speech in terms of the range and variation of fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and duration. Whether individuals with severe DYS can adequately signal prosodic contrasts and "which" acoustic cues they use to do so has received…

Retaining detailed representations of unstressed syllables is a logical prerequisite for infants' use of probabilistic phonotactics to segment iambic words from fluent speech. The head-turn preference study was used to investigate the nature of English- learners' representations of iambic word onsets. Fifty-four 10.5-month-olds were familiarized…

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…