This paper investigates the place of culture in the Tunisian English for the biology curriculum. To this end, the English language materials used were evaluated. The findings suggested that the materials used do not answer students' needs with respect to exponents of communicative functions, appropriate intonation patterns, norms of politeness,…

Mechanisms of cortical reorganization underlying the enhancement of speech processing have been poorly investigated. In the present study, we addressed changes in functional and effective connectivity induced in subjects who learned to deliberately increase activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG), and improved their ability to…

This paper presents findings from two eye-tracking studies designed to investigate the role of metrical prosody in silent reading. In Experiment 1, participants read stress-alternating noun-verb or noun-adjective homographs (e.g. "PREsent", "preSENT") embedded in limericks, such that the lexical stress of the homograph, as determined by context,…

The present study examines the effect of cross-varietal prosodic characteristics of two German varieties, Northern Standard German (NG) and Swiss German (SG), on the production and perception of foreign accent in L2 Belfast English. The analysis of production data revealed differences in the realisation of nuclear pitch accents in L1 German and L2…

Junctures are pauses used in speech separating thought-groups from one another in order to give the listener time to digest the utterance to signal the end. Where junctures are present, hearers find it easier to understand what is said as they are able to discern the individual words between such verbal breaks. Junctures being universal…

Memory is thought to be sparsely encoded throughout multiple brain regions forming unique memory trace. Although evidence has established that the amygdala is a key brain site for memory storage and retrieval of auditory conditioned fear memory, it remains elusive whether the auditory brain regions may be involved in fear memory storage or…

Intonational development has been an area of interest during the past four decades, from the perspectives of both production and perception. But relatively few conclusions have been made about how children acquire the intonational component of their grammar. To date, prior studies of intonational development have not included a fine-grained…

Despite the importance of speech naturalness to treatment outcomes, little research has been done on what constitutes speech naturalness and how to best maximize naturalness in relationship to other treatment goals like intelligibility. In addition, previous literature alludes to the relationship between prosodic aspects of speech and speech…

In this article, we reappraise the model of Discourse Analysis developed by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) to analyse classroom talk. We analyse an extract of teacher-student dialogue using this model, then re-analyse the same extract drawing on conventions and concepts developed within the framework of Conversation Analysis. We argue that this…

Chinese learners of Dutch and a control group of native speakers of Dutch were presented with 26 sentences in the order they come in a story, visually as well as auditorily as spoken with four intonation contours. Participants were instructed to select the most appropriate intonation contour for each sentence in a forced choice task. Chinese…

The study examined linguistic flexibility of Hebrew-speaking students from middle childhood to adolescence compared with adults on tasks requiring them to alternate between different versions of varied linguistic stimuli. Lexical flexibility was tested by constructing different words with a shared root and a shared prosodic template;…

This study investigates four aspects of Puerto Rican Spanish as represented in the Autonomous Municipality of Ponce: the behavior of coda /[alveolar flap]/, the behavior of /r/, the different realizations of coda /s/, and its intonational phonology. Previous studies on Puerto Rican Spanish report that coda /[alveolar flap]/ is normally realized as…

This paper addresses the power of intonation to convey interpersonal or attitudinal meaning. Speakers have been shown to accommodate to each other in the course of conversation, and this convergence may be perceived as a sign of empathy. Accommodation often involves paradigmatic choices--choosing the same words, gestures, regional accent or…

Recent research indicates that knowledge of words' spellings can influence knowledge of the phonological forms of second language (L2) words when the first and second languages use the same orthographic symbols. It is yet unknown whether learners can make similar use of unfamiliar orthographic symbols. In this study we investigate whether native…

This dissertation studies the realization of the rhythm of Taiwan Mandarin and focuses on the quality of its unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables. Taiwan Mandarin (TM) is often described as more syllable-timed than Standard Mandarin (SM). In TM, the unstressed syllables occur less frequently. The quality of the unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables…