The purpose of the present research study was to examine effects of the use of SmartMusic practice software on the intonation and rhythmic accuracy of brass players' musical performances. Twenty college brass players who served as participants in the four-week study were randomly assigned to one of two practice conditions. The WSM (With…

The classic picture of an autistic individual includes an impoverished ability to interpret or express emotion. The prosody of spoken language in autistic children is thought to lack emotional content. In this study, the verbal intonation of children with autism was examined and compared to that of children with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and normal…

Eight map task dialogs representative of general Australian English were coded for speaker turn and for dialog acts using a version of SWBD-DAMSL, a dialog act annotation scheme. High, low, simple, and complex rising tunes, and any corresponding dialog act codes were then compared. The Australian statement high rise (usually realized as a L…

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)

In this paper, a new automatic contour tracking system, EdgeTrak, for the ultrasound image sequences of human tongue is presented. The images are produced by a head and transducer support system (HATS). The noise and unrelated high-contrast edges in ultrasound images make it very difficult to automatically detect the correct tongue surfaces. In…

Evidence that the abilities to repeat nonwords and to learn language are very closely related to one another has led to widespread interest in the cognitive processes underlying nonword repetition. One suggestion is that nonword repetition is a relatively pure measure of phonological short-term memory closely associated with other measures of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate vibrato performance of university student and high school string players. Forty violinists and cellists performed an eight-measure passage both with and without vibrato. Analyses indicated that the mean rate of vibrato was approximately 5.5 Hz, with no significant differences between instruments or…

Revised version of a paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Western Conference on Linguistics, Vancouver, October 22, 1971. (VM)

Vocal pitch acuity on ascending intervals is highly superior to acuity on the same descending intervals. (Author)

Temporal control has often been suspected to be a critical factor in intonation production. In particular, disturbance in the production of fundamental frequency (F0) associated with intonation in patients with aphasia has been attributed to a primary underlying deficit in speech timing. The present study examined the speech timing abilities of…

The see-saw pair is a technique for perceptually contrasting the two realizations of the third tone, viz. the low-level half third and the low dip full third. (DD)

Study of the phonological systems in the language of twins, two-and-a-half years old. (VM)

Suggestions are given for teaching Russian conventions for the general question intonation, and it is proposed that instruction is clearer if students are encouraged to make comparisons within and among English intonation patterns. (MSE)