It is shown that a particular class of pauses taken in both read and composed speech obey allometric laws such that mean pause length predicts body size. The pauses in this class have durations that roughly span 250 ms to 1,000 ms and are taken to mark grammatical and prosodic boundaries. A theory of pause allometry is developed based on the…

Gender differences are manifested not only in the physiological characteristics of a person, but also in the speech communication. This article presents the research data obtained at the phonetic and lexical levels of the language. The purpose of this work is to determine the speech characteristics that distinguish men and women at the studied…

Purpose: Humans have a near-automatic tendency to entrain their motor actions to rhythms in the environment. Entrainment has been hypothesized to play an important role in processing naturalistic stimuli, such as speech and music, which have intrinsically rhythmic properties. Here, we studied two facets of entraining one's rhythmic motor actions…

Previous event-related potentials (ERP) research has investigated how foreign accent modulates listeners' neural responses to lexical-semantic and morphosyntactic errors. We extended this line of research to consider whether pronunciation errors in Mandarin Chinese are processed differently when a foreign-accented speaker makes them relative to…

The detrimental consequences of suggestive witness manipulation have been frequently discussed in the literature. Notably, these discussions have been limited to the consequences of suggestive question types and interrogator conduct. This study is the first to investigate the influence of interrogator's intonation on interrogative suggestibility.…

Speaking in public involves three parts: an act, a process, and art; however, stage fright is a common dilemma for students across all proficiency levels and cultural orientations. In this paper, some critical factors of successful public speaking affecting both students' self-scoring and the professor's grading of in-class presentations were…

In Experiment 1, rats were trained in a symbolic delayed matching-to-sample task to discriminate sample stimuli that consisted of sequences of magazine light flashes. The intertrial interval was illuminated by the houselight for Group Light, and it was dark for Group Dark. Retention functions exhibited a choose-many response bias when the delay…

Grade-school children's selective listening preferences for natural and altered narratives were investigated. (Author)

Discusses semiotics, which, in dealing with how meaning is communicated, views language as only one component of communication activity. Gives special attention to the new perspectives which semiotics has given to the study and teaching of intonation. (FB)

A study examined patterns of language use, including intonation, in a single social group of high school students, six "nerd girls." The group formed an "anti-club" to celebrate the individuals' disparate interests. Student narratives and group exchanges are analyzed for expressions of nerd group affiliation and identity,…