Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible…

Computational models of child language development can help us understand the cognitive underpinnings of the language learning process, which occurs along several linguistic levels at once (e.g., prosodic and phonological). However, in light of the replication crisis, modelers face the challenge of selecting representative and consolidated infant…

Why are spatial metaphors, like the use of "high" to describe a musical pitch, so common? This study tested one hundred and fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old English-learning children on their ability to learn a novel adjective in the domain of space or pitch and to extend this adjective to the untrained dimension. Children were more…

Purpose: Vocal roughness is often present in many voice disorders but the assessment of roughness mainly depends on the subjective auditory-perceptual evaluation and lacks acoustic correlates. This study aimed to apply the concept of roughness in general sound quality perception to vocal roughness assessment and to characterize the relationship…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of wearing earplugs on classical musicians' pitch perception across three experimental conditions: no earplugs, foam earplugs, and Etymotic earplugs. Participants were graduate and undergraduate music majors attending a large school of music in the southeastern United States (N = 72).…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also…

Whereas many scholars have emphasized the relative importance of "comprehensibility" as an ecologically valid goal for L2 speech training, testing, and development, eliciting listeners' judgments is time-consuming. Following calls for research on more efficient L2 speech rating methods in applied linguistics, and growing attention toward…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

Purpose: ?he lexical stress pattern (trochaic vs. iambic) may affect various aspects of word learning and word production in children with cochlear implants (CIs). This study aimed to investigate lexical stress effects in word learning by Greek-speaking children with CIs. Method: A word learning paradigm, consisting of a word production and a word…

This study examines the effect of native "vs." non-native prosody instruction on developing interpreter trainees' speech comprehensibility in English as a foreign language (EFL) using a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design. Twenty-three groups of 28 interpreter trainees at a University in Iran (six different branches) took part in…

Background and Aims: This longitudinal study investigated the language skills, phonological working memory and lexical-tone perception of Mandarin-speaking late-talkers (LTs) and those with typical language development (TLD) at 27 months, while also examining their connections with novel word-referent mapping (W-R mapping) through eye-tracking at…

Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

Our motivation was to examine how toddler (2;6) and adult speakers of American English prosodically realize information status categories. The aims were three-fold: (1) to analyze how adults phonologically make information status distinctions; (2) to examine how these same categories are signaled in toddlers' spontaneous speech; and (3) to analyze…

We investigated how native and fluent users of English segment continuous speech and to what extent they use sound-related and structure-related cues. As suggested by the notion of multi-competence, L1 users are not seen as ideal models with perfect command of English, and L2 users not as lacking in competence. We wanted to see how language…

This article reports on two experiments that examine the computation of contrastive focus in Russian on the part of adult English-dominant heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian, in comparison with baseline monolinguals. The first experiment uses an acceptability judgment task to determine whether bilingual and monolingual…