Rhetorical word stress has been identified as a feature of public, presentational, and didactic speech styles in Spanish through theoretical descriptions, intuitive accounts, and laboratory-based empirical research. Most scholars agree that non-primary stress is acoustically marked by pitch and primary stress is marked by segment lengthening. The…

The purpose of this study was to validate previous research that suggests using movement in conjunction with singing tasks can affect intonation and perception of the task. Singers (N = 49) were video and audio recorded, using a motion capture system, while singing a phrase from a familiar song, first with no motion, and then while doing a low,…

Recent studies on the learning of L2 prosody have suggested that pitch gestures can enhance the learning of the L2 lexical tones. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of these gestures can aid the learning of L2 intonation, especially by tonal-language speakers. Sixty-four Mandarin speakers with basic-level Spanish were asked to learn three…

We examined the relationship between two metalinguistic tasks: prosodic awareness and punctuation ability. Specifically, we investigated whether adults' ability to punctuate was related to the degree to which they are aware of and able to manipulate prosody in spoken language. English-speaking adult readers (n = 115) were administered a receptive…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether the degree of dominance of Mandarin-English bilinguals' languages affects phonetic processing of tone content in their native language, Mandarin. Method: We tested 72 Mandarin-English bilingual college students with a range of language-dominance profiles in the 2 languages and ages of…

The current study investigated first language (L1) effects on listener judgment of comprehensibility and accentedness in second language (L2) speech. The participants were 45 university-level adult speakers of English from three L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Hindi, Farsi), performing a picture narrative task. Ten native English listeners used…

This study examined whether "melodic contour deafness" (insensitivity to the direction of pitch movement) in congenital amusia is associated with specific types of pitch patterns (discrete versus gliding pitches) or stimulus types (speech syllables versus complex tones). Thresholds for identification of pitch direction were obtained using discrete…

Considering the contradictory research on explicit teaching of suprasegmentals, the present study aims to investigate the effects of explicit instruction of L2 English learners' perception of prosodically ambiguous intonation patterns, as well as the possible effects of reported musical familiarity on intonation acquisition. A control group and a…

A study investigated whether fluency in oral reading, as indicated by proper intonation, could be used as a measure of college students' reading comprehension. The study was designed to look at the three features of intonation--pitch, stress, and juncture--separately and in combination to determine whether any one or a combination of all the…

This study explored nonverbal communication in one-to-one music performance instruction by investigating relationships among nonverbal sensitivity, nonverbal behaviors and lesson effectiveness. Subjects (N = 120) comprised 60 college teachers and 60 of their non-music major students. Using the Music Lesson Evaluation Form, lesson effectiveness was…

This study examines the reliability of automatic speech recognition (ASR) software used to teach English pronunciation, focusing on one particular piece of software, "FluSpeak, as a typical example." Thirty-six Korean English as a Foreign Language (EFL) college students participated in an experiment in which they listened to 15 sentences…