Every language has its own rhythm. Unlike many other languages in the world, English depends on the correct pronunciation of stressed and unstressed or weakened syllables recurring in the same phrase or sentence. Mastering the rhythm of English makes speaking more effective. Experiments have shown that we tend to hear speech as more rhythmical…

This dissertation investigates how boundary temporal and tonal events are coordinated to oral constrictions in Greek. Regarding the temporal events, most studies agree in that boundary lengthening is cumulative (i.e., larger the stronger the boundary) (e.g., Cho & Keating 2001, Tabain 2003b) and progressive (i.e., decreasing with distance from…

Richards (2006, 2010) suggests that wh-movement is prosodically driven. Based on the position of the Comp(lementizer) and the marking of prosodic phrase edges, he claims that if Comp is on one side and the language marks the opposite side of prosodic phrases, then the wh-phrase does not move since Comp and wh-phrase can create a prosodic wh-domain…

Itoman, one of the varieties spoken in the southern part of Okinawa Island, exhibits several tone patterns. Although the tone patterns of Itoman were examined in previous studies (Nakasone ms., Hattori 1959, Oshiro 1963, and Hirayama et al. 1966), they ended at the descriptive level, and no phonological accounts for the surface tone patterns were…

This paper is an experimental investigation on the tonal structure and phonetic signaling of declarative questions by speakers of Manchego Peninsular Spanish, a dialect of Spanish for which little experimental research on intonation is currently available. Analysis 1 examines the scaling and timing properties of final rises produced by 16 speakers…

This article offers an interactional account of turn continuations in Chinese conversation, which are characterized as (a) being effected by latching/rush-through, (b) being clauses with predicates, either main or adverbial, and (c) taking a retrospective orientation in the kind of interactional work they do. Close examination reveals that while,…

The empirical focus of this paper is a conversational turn-taking phenomenon in which conjunctions produced immediately after a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion are treated by co-participants as points of possible completion and transition relevance. The data for this study are audio-video recordings of 5 unscripted…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to identify speech information processed by a hearing aid (HA) that is additive to information processed by a cochlear implant (CI) as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Method: Speech recognition was measured with CI alone, HA alone, and CI + HA. Ten participants were separated into 2 groups; good…

Prosody plays a vital role in communication, but is one of the most widely neglected topics in language documentation. This omission is doubly detrimental since intonation is unrecoverable from transcribed texts, the most prevalent data sources for many indigenous languages. One of the underlying reasons for the dearth of prosodic data is…

In this study, personality compliance levels are examined according to tonality and tempo variables, which are acquired in consequence of analysis of music genres and pieces to which fine arts faculty, trainee music teachers mostly listen. A total of 31 students participated in the study. Data acquired from Hacettepe Personality Inventory (HPI)…

Background: Text reading prosody has been associated with reading comprehension. However, text reading prosody is a reading-dependent measure that relies heavily on decoding skills. Investigation of the contribution of speech prosody--which is independent from reading skills--in addition to text reading prosody, to reading comprehension could…

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…

Background: People transitioning from male to female (MTF) gender seek speech-language pathology services when they feel their voice is betraying their genuine self or perhaps is the last obstacle to representing their authentic gender. Speaking fundamental frequency (pitch) and resonance are most often targets in treatment because the combination…

This paper presents a study of factors affecting judgments of native and non-native accent in German. The data suggest that listener status (native or non-native speakers) and degree of experience with German play a role in the aspects of speech which raters cite as salient. Interestingly, the same descriptive terms used by raters were shown to…

The training of tactical decision making increasingly occurs through serious computer games. A challenging aspect of designing such games is the modelling of human emotions. Two studies were performed to investigate the relation between fidelity and human emotion recognition in virtual human characters. Study 1 compared five versions of a virtual…