In Experiment 1, rats were trained in a symbolic delayed matching-to-sample task to discriminate sample stimuli that consisted of sequences of magazine light flashes. The intertrial interval was illuminated by the houselight for Group Light, and it was dark for Group Dark. Retention functions exhibited a choose-many response bias when the delay…

In this article, the author relates how the use of kazoos has helped her students sing melodies by sight. She was initially troubled by her students lack of confidence in making pitches. After several weeks of using kazoos, her students were able to develop a true sense of matching pitch and became more successful in all elements of dictation.

Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Experiment 1) and heritage Russian-English bilingual (Experiment 2) listeners process contrastiveness online in Russian. Materials were color adjective-noun phrases embedded into the split-constituent construction Krasnuju polozite zvezdovku..."Red put…

This study investigates how "unknowing" story recipients (C. Goodwin, 1979) use different types of questions in order to actively participate in storytelling and collaboratively construct a story when a storyteller is relaying his or her past experience, by examining grammar, intonation, gaze, body movements, and sequence organization in Japanese…

Background: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia are known to have impairments in various aspects of phonology, which have been claimed to cause their language and literacy impairments. However, "phonology" encompasses a wide range of skills, and little is known about whether these phonological impairments extend to…

Neural representation of pitch is influenced by lifelong experiences with music and language at both cortical and subcortical levels of processing. The aim of this article is to determine whether neural plasticity for pitch representation at the level of the brainstem is dependent upon specific "dimensions" of pitch contours that commonly occur as…

Brazil's system of discourse intonation (DI) is critically appraised, and some shortcomings are described. Modifications to DI are suggested, the most important being to recognize that tones have meanings derived from two functions: firstly to indicate the distribution of knowledge between speaker and listener--the analysis of tone in yes/no…

Background: Previous research has shown a relationship between speech perception and dyslexia in alphabetic writing. In these studies speech perception was measured using phonemes, a prominent feature of alphabetic languages. Given the primary importance of lexical tone in Chinese language processing, we tested the extent to which lexical tone and…

Detailed research concerning the issue fluency, specifically relating to pauses, mean length runs, and fluency rates in Japanese EFL learners, is limited. Furthermore, the issue of tracking fluency gains has often been ignored, misunderstood or minimized in EFL educational research. The present study, which is based on six monologues conducted…

In language learning, infants are faced with the challenge of decomposing continuous speech into relevant units, such as syntactic clauses and words. Within the framework of prosodic bootstrapping, behavioral studies suggest infants approach this segmentation problem by relying on prosodic information, especially on acoustically marked…

In the context of a project developing software for pronunciation practice and feedback for Mandarin-speaking learners of English, a key issue is how to decide which features of pronunciation to focus on in giving feedback. We used naive and experienced native speaker ratings of comprehensibility and nativeness to establish the key features…

The purpose of our study was to compare the effectiveness of two song-teaching methods: holistic and phrase-by-phrase. Thirty-two first-grade children (n = 32) from two music classes in an urban elementary school were taught two folksongs. The first class (n = 16) was taught one song through the phrase-by-phrase method and another song through the…

This study describes the development of emerging intonation in six children who had received a cochlear implant (CI) before the age of 3 years. At the time their implant was activated, the children ranged in age from 11-37 months. Spontaneous longitudinal speech samples were recorded from 30-minute sessions in which the child interacted with his…

This study examined the developmental course of infants' attentional preferences for 3 types of infant-directed affective intent, which have been shown to be commonly used at particular ages in the first year of life. Specifically, Kitamura and Burnham (2003) found mothers' tone of voice in infant-directed speech is most comforting between birth…

An area of considerable interest in second language (L2) acquisition is the difficulties learners face with the acquisition of articles. This article examines the role of prosody in the acquisition of articles by an endstate L2 English speaker focusing on the free morphemes "the" and "a". In order to analyse the articles produced by a Turkish…