This paper discusses the influence of stationary (non-fluctuating) noise on processing and understanding of sentences, which vary in their syntactic complexity (with the factors canonicity, embedding, ambiguity). It presents data from two RT-studies with 44 participants testing processing of German sentences in silence and in noise. Results show a…

The purpose of this research was to compare selected speech and paralinguistic skills of speakers with Williams syndrome (WS) and typically developing peers and to demonstrate the feasibility of providing preexisting databases to students to facilitate graduate research. In a series of three studies, conversational samples of 12 adolescents with…

Prosody can be expressed not only by modification to the timing, stress and intonation of auditory speech but also by modifying visual speech. Studies have shown that the production of visual cues to prosody is highly variable (both within and across speakers), however behavioural studies have shown that perceivers can effectively use such visual…

The current study examined in depth the effects of suprasegmental-based instruction on the global (comprehensibility) and suprasegmental (word stress, rhythm, and intonation) development of Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Students in the experimental group (n = 10) received a total of three hours of instruction over six…

This study focused on an instructional component often neglected when teaching the pronunciation of English as either a second, foreign, or international language--namely, the suprasegmental feature of lexical stress. Extending previous research on collaborative priming tasks and task repetition, the study investigated the impact of task and…

This paper reports on an intervention study with young Polish beginners (mean age: 8 years, 3 months) learning English at school. It seeks to identify whether exposure to rhythmic input improves knowledge of word order and function words. The "prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis", relevant in developmental psycholinguistics, provided the…

Italian has regular spelling-sound correspondences; however, assignment of lexical stress is unpredictable. Sensitivity to stress neighborhood information was investigated by constructing three types of three-syllabic nonwords: nonwords with word-endings characterized by a strong neighborhood of dominant stress words (dominant), nonwords with…

Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that…

A realistic goal of pronunciation teaching in the second language context is to acquire comfortably intelligible rather than native-like pronunciation. To establish a set of teaching and learning priorities necessary for English teachers and students whose first language is Chinese, the purposes of this study are three fold: (1) Identify the…

The greatest difficulty in reading Arabic script for nonnatives is the absence of short vowels. The correlation of 28 consonants with sounds poses no great difficulty. In Arabic, there are six vowel phonemes which are voiced only by three letters with help of some relevant diacritical marks (?arakat). As the bulk of Arabic publications is written…

The present study reports on the findings of a cross-sectional acoustic study of the production of Spanish vowels by three different groups of speakers: 1) native Spanish speakers; 2) native English intermediate learners of Spanish; and 3) native English advanced learners of Spanish. In particular, we examined the production of the five Spanish…

The importance of prosodic elements is recognised in most definitions of fluency. Although speed and accuracy have been typically considered the constituents of reading fluency, prosody is emerging as an additional component. The relevance of prosody in comprehension is increasingly recognised in the latest studies. The purpose of this research is…

Text reading fluency--the ability to read quickly, accurately and with a natural intonation--has been proposed as a predictor of reading comprehension. In the current study, we examined the role of oral text reading fluency, defined as text reading rate and text reading prosody, as a contributor to reading comprehension outcomes in addition to…

Having received the stamp of an "often neglected" element in second language teaching, opinions of English Language Teaching (ELT) Teacher Trainees (TT) taking pronunciation as an explicit instruction course seem to be neglected in research advocated in this field as well. Moreover, features of pronunciation (segmentals and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the directionality of the relationship between text reading prosody and reading comprehension in the upper grades of primary school. We compared 3 theoretical possibilities: Two unidirectional relations from text reading prosody to reading comprehension and from reading comprehension to text reading prosody…