The role of allophonic differences in contributing to the non-native speaker's "foreign accent." (FWB)

It was determined that suprasegmental features effect the ability of very young children (3 years) to decide whether strings of words are to be treated as sentences or nonsentences, whereas for adults and older children grammatical cues alone suffice. (FWB)

Contends that the acquisition of fluent reading competency involves beginning readers' tacit recognition that they must learn to compensate for the absence of prosodic cues in the written signal by making use of the cues that are preserved. (HOD)

Discusses trends and developments in generative phonology; metatheory and evidence in phonology; and segments, features, and marking. (RL)

Experiments were conducted to examine the influence of syntactic boundaries on the operation of a phonological rule in speech production. Results indicate that traditional metrics of boundary strength, as well as linguistic formulations of phonological rules, must be elaborated to recognize the special status of clause boundaries and deletion…

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…