The paper focuses on the vers libre prosody taking into account the auditory aspect of its oral actualisation. The main hypothesis of the study is that vers libre is constituted with a range of definite stable prosodic features that allow referring it to versification and at the same time to something different from a metered text and prose.…

We examined the unique contributions of prosodic awareness and morphological awareness to school-aged children's word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 110 elementary-age children from Grades 4 and 5 participated in the current study. To measure prosodic awareness, children were asked to listen to and reflect on the stress patterns of…

Onomatopoeia are disproportionately high in number in infants' early words compared to adult language. Studies of infant language perception have proposed an iconic advantage for onomatopoeia, which may make them easier for infants to learn. This study analyses infants' early word production to show a phonological motivation for onomatopoeia in…

The history of Chinese language is characterized by a clear shift from monosyllabic to disyllabic words (Wang, 1980). This dissertation aims to provide a new diachronic explanation for the rise of disyllables in the history of Chinese and to demonstrate its significance for Modern Chinese prosody and lexicalization. A corpus of 300 Lianmian words…

In this study, segmental and prosodic aspects of word repetition and non-word repetition in typically developing children aged four to six years were investigated. Focus was on developmental differences, and on how tonal word accent and word length affect segment production accuracy. Prosodically controlled words and non-words were repeated by 44…

Prosodic patterning is a key structural element of spoken language. However, the potential role of prosodic awareness in the phonological difficulties that characterise children with developmental dyslexia has been little studied. Here we report the first longitudinal study of sensitivity to syllable stress in children with dyslexia, enabling the…

This dissertation investigates the linguistic and social constraints on the occurrence of creaky voice quality (creak) in Beijing Mandarin (BM), as well as the effect of linguistic and prosodic context on creak's social meanings for Mandarin listeners. It is a two-phase study, composed of 1) a production study of the distribution of creak in the…