Autistic adults are often perceived as having an atypical speech. The acoustic characteristics of these impressions prove surprisingly difficult to delineate, but one feature that does robustly emerge across different studies is higher pitch (F0 values) in autistic versus neurotypical individuals. However, there is no clear explanation why…

Vocal imitation in English-speaking autistic individuals has been shown to be atypical. Speaking a tone language such as Mandarin facilitates vocal imitation skills among non-autistic individuals, yet no studies have examined whether this effect holds for autistic individuals. To address this question, we compared vocal imitation of speech and…

Purpose: Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder of musical pitch processing. Its linguistic consequences have been examined separately for speech intonations and lexical tones. However, in a tonal language such as Chinese, the processing of intonations and lexical tones interacts with each other during online speech perception. Whether and…

The study was conducted to investigate the effects of video-based shadowing on pre-intermediate EFL learners' pronunciation performance of suprasegmental features as well as explore their attitudes toward the technique. The study employed three instruments including pre-and post-tests, a questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews, to…

Negative yes-no (polar) questions in Colloquial Arabic (CA) are formed by intonation without adding yes-no question particles, in which case, a statement is uttered with a rising intonation, whether this polar question is negative or affirmative. This case is more common in CA than written MSA. Sometimes, the same negative polar question is…

Purpose: This study builds upon an established effective training method to investigate the advantages of high variability phonetic identification training for enhancing lexical tone perception and production in Mandarin-speaking pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients, who typically face ongoing challenges in these areas. Method: Thirty-two…

Enhanced pitch perception has been identified in autistic individuals, but it remains understudied whether such enhancement can be observed in the lexical tone perception of language-delayed autistic children. This study examined the categorical perception of Mandarin lexical tones in 23 language-delayed autistic children and two groups of…

Learning new information constitutes a fundamental part of children's school years. Recently, studies have found beneficial effects of emotion on learning and memory. Here, we specifically examined the effect of positive emotional prosody on content learning in two groups of Swedish school children (ages 8-10 and 11-13 years). The participants…

There is a long-standing debate in the literature about the benefits that acoustic components of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) might have for infants' language acquisition. One of the highly contested features is vowel space expansion, which refers to the enlargement of the acoustic space between the corner vowels /i, u, a/ in IDS compared to Adult…

Purpose: Categorical perception (CP) manifests in various aspects of human cognition. While there is mounting evidence for CP in facial emotions, CP in vocal emotions remains understudied. The current study attempted to test whether individuals with a tonal language background perceive vocal emotions categorically and to examine how factors such…

Friday sermons portray patterns of lexical cohesion which can demonstrate how effective communication is achieved. This study proposes a model of lexical cohesion that fits the spoken discourse of Friday sermons in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To that end, a corpus of 25 sermons was analyzed to identify patterns of cohesion and show the impact…

The use of education applications in language learning is rapidly increasing. This research aims to analyse the tonal perception ability of Chinese students using the Thai Tone Application with minimal pairs approach. The participants were divided into two groups, an experimental group (ones who studied in the class and used the application) and a…

Purpose: Previous research has indicated the beneficial effects of musical training on speech perception in children. However, little has been known about whether musical training exerts transfer effects on fine-grained perception of linguistic pitch and time information. This study aimed to investigate the effects of different musical training…

We report four experiments investigating the effect of prosody on listening comprehension in 11-13-year-old children. Across all experiments, participants listened to short object descriptions and answered content-based questions about said objects. In Experiments 1-3, the descriptions were read in an emotionally positive or neutral tone of voice.…

This paper explored and analyzed features of English pronunciation that could cause intelligibility problems for Nepali English learners (ELs), who use English as a foreign language (EFL) or English as a second language (ESL). We examined the Nepali ELs' pronunciation issues by juxtaposing them with comparable segmental and suprasegmental features…