The purpose of this paper is to study the strategies used by Cameroonians and Nigerians to cope with the notorious complexity of English word stress. Stress placement is similar among these two groups, but differs significantly from what obtains in traditional native English speech, received pronunciation (RP), for example. Some of the stress…

South Africa, as a multilingual country, offers the opportunity for examining the interaction between aphasic symptomatology and the parameters of language. Effective intervention techniques depend on an understanding of clinical linguistics. This article describes an intervention study with two Sesotho-speaking individuals with anomia. Sesotho as…

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…

While the importance of phonological sensitivity for understanding reading acquisition and impairment across orthographies is well documented, what underlies deficits in phonological sensitivity is not well understood. Some researchers have argued that speech perception underlies variability in phonological representations. Others have…

As a result of exposure, infants acquire biases that conform to the rhythmic properties of their native language. Previous lexical stress preference studies have shown that English- and German-, but not French-learning infants, show a bias toward trochaic words. The present study explores Spanish-learning infants' lexical stress preferential…

We present results obtained with new instrumental methods for the acoustic analysis of prosody to evaluate prosody production by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Typical Development (TD). Two tasks elicit focal stress--one in a vocal imitation paradigm, the other in a picture-description paradigm; a third task also uses a vocal…

Catch Up® Literacy is a structured one-to-one literacy intervention for pupils between the ages of 6 and 14 who are struggling to learn to read. It teaches pupils to blend phonemes (combine letter sounds into words), segment phonemes (separate words into letter sounds), and memorise particular words so they can be understood without needing to use…

Much of what we think we know about the performance of humor relies on our intuitions about prosody (e.g., "it's all about timing"); however, this has never been empirically tested. Thus, the central question addressed in this article is whether speakers mark punch lines in jokes prosodically and, if so, how. To answer this question,…

English-learning 7.5-month-olds are heavily biased to perceive stressed syllables as word onsets. By 11 months, however, infants begin segmenting non-initially stressed words from speech. Using the same artificial language methodology as Johnson and Jusczyk (2001), we explored the possibility that the emergence of this ability is linked to a…

Historically, agrammatism, a symptom of Broca's aphasia, has been associated with dysprosody, on account of speakers' slow, halting, and effortful speech. Almost all investigations of this phenomenon use experimental methods (reading, repetition). Thus, little is known about how prosody is used by speakers with agrammatism and understood by their…

This study validated a video game paradigm to explore attention to prosodic and linguistic components of spoken sentences in nine moderate-to-low functioning children with autism and impaired verbal skills. Nine typically developing children were also included. The children listened to pre-recorded sentences varying with respect to content (e.g.,…

In recent years the use of new technologies has been extensively explored in different aspects of language learning pedagogy. The objective of this research was to investigate the impact Repeated Reading activity, supported by iPod Touch could have on the English Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) of second language university students with Special…

This study examined oral reading fluency (ORF) of bilingual and monolingual students. The author selected a sample of 510 (258 males and 252 females) native Arabic-speaking sixth-graders (62 bilinguals and 448 monolinguals) in Egypt. The purposes were; (a) to examine oral reading rate, oral reading accuracy, prosody, and oral reading comprehension…

Considering the contradictory research on explicit teaching of suprasegmentals, the present study aims to investigate the effects of explicit instruction of L2 English learners' perception of prosodically ambiguous intonation patterns, as well as the possible effects of reported musical familiarity on intonation acquisition. A control group and a…