This paper addresses the power of intonation to convey interpersonal or attitudinal meaning. Speakers have been shown to accommodate to each other in the course of conversation, and this convergence may be perceived as a sign of empathy. Accommodation often involves paradigmatic choices--choosing the same words, gestures, regional accent or…

This dissertation is about what prosody contributes to dialogue interpretation. The view of prosody developed in this account is based on detailed quantitative investigations of the prosodic forms and interpretations of cue word and declarative responses, specifically with respect to the distribution and interpretation of terminal pitch rises.…

Suprasegmental elements such as "stress," "pitch," "juncture" and "linkers" are language universals that are uttered naturally in the mother tongue without prior training but need to be learned systematically in the target language. Among other techniques of "sentential pronunciation teaching" to…

Few prior studies have examined degree of fidelity between raters' assessments of oral performances and objectively observable prosodic indices of accentedness. Prosodic indices of accentedness quantify trait-relevant variance, whereas rater background variables represent trait-irrelevant variance. The present study, therefore, investigated the…

This study focuses on prosodic evolution in the French news announcer style, based on acoustic and perceptual analysis of French audiovisual archives. A 10-hour corpus covering six decades of broadcast news is investigated automatically. Two prosodic features, which may give an impression of emphatic style, are explored: word-initial stress and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between prosodic oral reading and overall reading comprehension of second grade students. The sample consisted of ten students who were randomly selected from a second grade classroom. The students read aloud from the book "Bedtime for Frances" by Lillian and Russell Hoban for a…

Articulatory kinematics were investigated using electromagnetic articulography (EMA) in four dysarthric speakers with Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA). Specifically, tongue-tip and tongue-back movements were recorded by the AG-200 EMA system during production of the consonants t and k as produced within a sentence utterance and during a rapid syllable…

Pitch, the perceptual correlate of fundamental frequency (F0), plays an important role in speech, music, and animal vocalizations. Changes in F0 over time help define musical melodies and speech prosody, while comparisons of simultaneous F0 are important for musical harmony, and for segregating competing sound sources. This study compared…

This study examined teaching SP of English verbs through the data-driven learning (DDL) approach and its effect on learners' vocabulary choice appropriateness in the Persian English foreign language (EFL) context. In the present study, two male intact classes were selected. One of these two classes was randomly selected as a treatment group and…

This article details the findings of a study into lecturers' perceptions of undergraduate employability. The investigation employed interviews with the staff on a BA (Hons) in Education Studies course at a post-1992 university. The aim was to examine staff beliefs regarding their students' potential employability in the business and finance…

This dissertation investigates how the Taiwanese Tone Sandhi Groups are perceived, and the acoustic/phonetics correlates of listeners' judgments. A series of perception experiments have been conducted to scrutinize the following topics--Taiwanese tone neutralization, Tone Sandhi Group (TSG) as a prosodic domain, perceived boundary strength in…

This dissertation project examined the influence of language typology on the use of segmentation cues by second language (L2) learners of English. Previous research has shown that native English speakers rely more on sentence context and lexical knowledge than segmental (i.e. phonotactics or acoustic-phonetics) or prosodic cues (e.g., word stress)…

Children with reading disability and normal reading development were compared in their ability to discriminate native (English) and novel language (Mandarin) from nonlinguistic sounds. Children's preference for native versus novel language sounds and for disyllables containing dominant trochaic versus non-dominant iambic stress patterns was also…

National reports reveal one third of American fourth graders read below basic level on measures of comprehension. One critical component of comprehension is fluency: rapid, accurate, expressive reading with automaticity and prosody. Many fluency studies and classroom interventions focus only on reading rate, but this alone is not sufficient. This…

The work described in this report is the second phase of a project to provide easy-to-use tools for authoring and rendering secondaryschool algebra-levelmath expressions insynthesized speech that is useful for studentswithblindnessor lowvision.This report describes the development and results of the second feedback study performed for our project,…