The present experiments tested bilingual infants' developmental narrowing for the interpretation of sounds that form words. These studies addressed how language specialization proceeds when the environment provides varied and divergent input. Experiment 1 (N = 32) demonstrated that bilingual 14- and 19-month-olds learned a pair of object labels…

Background: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate deficits in vocabulary development and novel word learning processes, which have been proposed to stem from their speech perception deficits. Aims: This study had two aims. The first was to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention incorporating a computer-based phonetic…

This report [1] focuses on four upper-intermediate and advanced English language learners being supported as international teaching assistants (ITAs) at a research university in the U.S. [1] Learners had little experience using English in extended speech, and little grasp of Discourse Intonation (DI), which is how a speaker uses the pausing and…

Background: The current study explored the effect of implicit prosody on syntactic parsing in the silent reading of an ambiguous double prepositional phrase (PP) construction in Hebrew by employing the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis test (Fodor, 2002). Method: The parsing preferences of the construction in silent reading were tested and compared to…

This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3-5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM)…

In the current study, we examined the developmental course of the perception of non-native tonal contrast. We tested 4, 6 and 12-month-old Dutch infants on their discrimination of Chinese low-rising tone and low-dipping tone using the visual fixation paradigm. The infants were tested in two conditions that differed in terms of degree of…

The purpose of this research is to analyze the speech intonation of the French, Kazakh, English and Russian languages. The study considers intonation component functions (of melodics, duration, and intensity) in poetry and language spoken. It is defined that a set of prosodic means are used in order to convey the intonational specifics of sounding…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between phonological awareness and music aptitude. I administered the Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation (IMMA) to second-grade students in a rural school in Pennsylvania (N = 17). Speech-language specialists administered a hearing screening and The Phonological Awareness Test 2…

This study investigated EFL teachers' orientations toward the assessment of pronunciation at the upper-secondary school level in Norway. Data were gathered from purposeful samples of 24 interview informants and 46 questionnaire respondents. The teachers were asked about their attitudes toward the assessment of nativeness and intelligibility,…

The ability to present effectively is essential for professionals; therefore, oral communication courses have become part of the curricula for higher education studies. However, speaking in public is still a challenge for many graduates. To tackle this problem, driven by the recent advances in computer vision techniques and prosody analysis,…

Background: German participles are formed by a co-occurrence of prefixation and suffixation. While the acquisition of regular and irregular suffixation has been investigated exhaustively, it is still unclear how German children master the prosodically determined prefixation rule (prefix "ge-"). Findings reported in the literature are…

"Interactional competence" is a theoretical construct that has only recently been tested empirically. Speakers contribute to an interaction with their individual resources; however, interactional competence is co-constructed by all participants. Interactional competence can be observed in spoken interaction as speakers' combined ability…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of lexical tone contour on the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences in quiet and in noise. Method: A text-to-speech synthesis engine was used to synthesize Mandarin sentences with each word carrying the original lexical tone, flat tone, or a tone randomly selected from the 4 Mandarin lexical tones. The…

Purpose: The rhythmic entrainment (coordination) of behavior during human interaction is a powerful phenomenon, considered essential for successful communication, supporting social and emotional connection, and facilitating sense-making and information exchange. Disruption in entrainment likely occurs in conversations involving those with speech…

While it is well established that non-native speakers differ from native speakers in their perception and/or production of Mandarin lexical tones, empirical studies focusing on non-native "learners" are still limited. The objective of this study is to add to the current understanding of lexical tone perception by comparing native…