This study considered how far nonverbal cognitive, language and reading abilities are affected by common genetic influences in a sample of 312 typically developing Chinese twin pairs aged from 3 to 11 years. Children were individually given tasks of Chinese word reading, receptive vocabulary, phonological memory, tone awareness, syllable and rhyme…

What are the effects of experience on subsequent learning? We explored the effects of language-specific word order knowledge on the acquisition of sequential conditional information. Korean and English adults were engaged in a sequence learning task involving three different sets of stimuli: auditory linguistic (nonsense syllables), visual…

The purpose of the dissertation is to examine Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of a syntax-dependent phonological rule Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S). A Tone 3 (low dipping tone) is changed to a Tone 2 (mid rising tone) when it is followed by another Tone 3. Application of T3S in fact involves a complex process. In setting up the prosodic domains…

This study explored the electrophysiology underlying intonational phrase processing at different stages of syntax acquisition. Developmental studies suggest that children's syntactic skills advance significantly between 2 and 3 years of age. Here, children of three age groups were tested on phrase-level prosodic processing before and after this…

In line with a communicative curriculum for English, it is claimed that communicative competence involves knowledge about when and how to display affectivity in talk-in-interaction. Typically, interjections have been described as a lexical means for expressions of emotion. A survey of textbooks canonical of EFL at German elementary and secondary…

Background: Web based speech training for dysarthric speakers, such as E-learning based Speech Therapy (EST), puts considerable demands on auditory discrimination abilities. Aims: To discuss the development and the evaluation of an auditory discrimination test (ADT) for the assessment of auditory speech discrimination skills in Dutch adult…

Introduction: The perception of syllable stress has not been widely studied in developmental dyslexia, despite strong evidence for auditory rhythmic perceptual difficulties. Here we investigate the hypothesis that perception of sound rise time is related to the perception of syllable stress in adults with developmental dyslexia. Methods: A…

We assessed the relationship between brain structure and function in 10 individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), compared to six unaffected siblings, and 16 unrelated control participants with typical language. Voxel-based morphometry indicated that grey matter in the SLI group, relative to controls, was increased in the left inferior…

Background: Physical education teacher behaviour has been a subject of study in physical education including physical education teacher education for 30 years. However, the research on teacher behaviour has tended to focus on direct teaching behaviour (DTB) to demonstrate the benefits of effective teaching, centred on a technical understanding of…

Understanding implicature--something meant, implied, or suggested distinct from what is said--is paramount for successful human communication. Yet, it is unclear how our cognitive abilities fill in gaps of unspecified information. This study presents three distinct sets of experiments investigating how people understand implied contrasts conveyed…

Phonology provides a system by which a limited number of types of phonetic variation can signal communicative intentions at multiple levels of linguistic analysis. Because phonologies vary from language to language, acquiring the phonology of a language demands learning to attribute phonetic variation appropriately. Here, we studied the case of…

Musically trained and untrained participants were administered tests of pitch processing and general intelligence ("g"). Trained participants exhibited superior performance on tests of pitch-processing speed and relative pitch. They were also better at frequency discrimination with tones at 400 Hz but not with very high tones (4000 Hz). The two…

This study analyzed the music reading performances of 6-13-year-old piano students (N = 35) in their second year of piano study. The stimuli consisted of three piano pieces, systematically constructed to vary in terms of left-hand complexity and input simultaneity. The music reading performances were recorded digitally and a code of error analysis…

While listeners are recognizing words from the connected speech stream, they are also parsing information from the intonational contour. This contour may contain cues to word boundaries, particularly if a language has boundary tones that occur at a large proportion of word onsets. We investigate how useful the pitch rise at the beginning of an…

In this paper I argue for a property-driven approach to phonological typology. Rather than seeking to classify or label languages, the central goal of phonological typology is to determine how different languages systematize the phonetic substance available to all languages. The paper focuses on a very murky area in phonological typology,…