In "Subatomic Writing," Johns Hopkins University instructor Jamie Zvirzdin goes bravely into uncharted territory by offering a totally new kind of guide for writing about science--from the subatomic level up! "Subatomic Writing" teaches readers that the building blocks of language are like particles in physics. These particles,…

This study examined prosody through characterization of acoustic properties of the speech of individuals with ASD and their parents, during narration. A subset of utterances were low-pass filtered and rated for differences in intonation, speech rate, and rhythm. Listener ratings were minimally related to acoustic measures, underscoring the…

A longitudinal study with 45 children (Hispanic, 13%; non-Hispanic, 87%) investigated whether the early production of non-referential beat and flip gestures, as opposed to referential iconic gestures, in parent-child naturalistic interactions from 14 to 58 months old predicts narrative abilities at age 5. Results revealed that only non-referential…

While research on sound and education has opened up important pathways, it dominantly approaches sound as meaningful. This paper charts another tendency, exploring sound as educational precisely because it resists our attempts at understanding. The force that guides this trajectory is that of timbre, or the nuance of sounds. I begin with…

OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained increasing popularity and importance because they greatly expand students' access to university lectures. Although the main component of OCW and MOOC platforms is lectures, their differences may potentially affect the difficulty of academic listening comprehension. This study…

Purpose: This preliminary investigation compared effects of time compression on intelligibility for male versus female talkers. We hypothesized that time compression would have a greater effect for female talkers. Method: Sentence materials from four talkers (two males) were time compressed, and original-speed and time-compressed speech materials…

Background: Stuttering, a neurodevelopmental speech fluency disorder, is associated with intermittent disruptions of speech-motor control. Behavioural treatments for adults who stutter (AWS) concentrate on adopting speech patterns that enhance fluency, such as speaking rhythmically or prolonging speech sounds. However, maintaining these treatment…

Rhythm metrics can detect second language development of target-like speech rhythm but interpretation of the results from metrics in learners' speech is problematic because the mapping of metrics to underpinning phonological features is indirect. We investigate speech rhythm in first language (L1) Arabic / second language (L2) English, which…

It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (e.g., mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal…

Rhythm perception seems to be crucial to language development. Many studies have shown that children with developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder have difficulties in processing rhythmic structures. In this study, we investigated the relationships between prosody and musical processing in Italian children with typical and…

Recently reported links between rhythm and grammar processing have opened new perspectives for using rhythm in clinical interventions for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Previous research using the rhythmic priming paradigm has shown improved performance on language tasks after regular rhythmic primes compared to control…

In the conducted field experiment, we explore the intensity of university students' interaction related to the seating arrangement (circle or rows) in pre-service teachers' groups during the reflective practice. We also probe the differences across the various fields of study and evaluate the facilitator's influence on the interaction. We use…

This study tested the effects of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words on the pronunciation of these words by 7- to 8-year-old Catalan children. In a short training experiment with a pre- and posttest design, 28 children either repeated cognate words in French (e.g. French "aspirateur," Catalan "aspirador"…

Research has described several features shared between musical rhythm and speech or language, and experimental studies consistently show associations between performance on tasks in the two domains as well as impaired rhythm processing in children with language disorders. Motivated by these results, in the current study our first aim was to…

Classroom time is limited, so the priority question in teaching pronunciation is to find an effective sequence of presentation. This article recounts one teacher's path to learning about different approaches to teaching English rhythm and why it is important. For many years, a common way of distinguishing languages has been based on the assumption…