Argues that applying the rhythm of speech to print will lead to improved oral and silent reading. (FL)

Using evidence from first-hand experimental work and existing studies, Colantoni and Gurlekian take a tentative but encouraging step towards exploring the role of contact in explaining intonational change. Their central question is whether Buenos Aires Spanish intonation is distinctive relative to other varieties of Spanish; and if so, whether…

Do young infants treat speech as a special signal, compared with structurally similar non-speech sounds? We presented 2- to 7-month-old infants with nonsense speech sounds and complex non-speech analogues. The non-speech analogues retain many of the spectral and temporal properties of the speech signal, including the pitch contour information…

Teachers may resist the notion of teaching as a performance but his or her voice, gestures, and movement in the classroom can help or harm student attentiveness. Strong skills in voice and movement can help illuminate a teacher's questions and ideas for students, drawing attention to what matters, holding their attention through a long class, and…

Evidence that the abilities to repeat nonwords and to learn language are very closely related to one another has led to widespread interest in the cognitive processes underlying nonword repetition. One suggestion is that nonword repetition is a relatively pure measure of phonological short-term memory closely associated with other measures of…

Lexical prosody (e.g., stress and pitch accent) has been shown to constrain lexical activation of spoken words in various languages. In the present study, whether or not the constraint of lexical prosody is affected by word familiarity in lexical access of Japanese words was examined using a cross-modal priming task. The stimuli were pairs of…

The role of prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension was investigated by means of three different tasks, namely auditory word monitoring (Experiment 1), self-paced reading (Experiment 2) and cross-modal comparison (Experiment 3). In all three experiments a critical prosodic unit or frame comprising a determiner, a noun and a Prepositional…

Phonological awareness (PA) is the ability to analyze spoken language into its component sounds and to manipulate these smaller units. Literature review related to PA shows that a variety of factor groups play a role in PA in Mandarin such as linguistic experience (spoken language, alphabetic literacy, and second language learning), item type,…

THE FOOCHOW DIALECT IS SPOKEN BY ABOUT SEVEN TO TEN MILLION CHINESE IN THE AREA IN AND AROUND THE CITY OF FOOCHOW, MAINLAND CHINA. THIS LANGUAGE MANUAL REPRESENTS THE SPEECH OF A LITERATE PERSON FROM THAT AREA. LESSONS 1-15 CONSIST OF--(1) SEVERAL SHORT FOOCHOW PASSAGES WRITTEN IN ROMANIZATION, (2) ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS, (3) A FOOCHOW TO ENGLISH…

Pitch-synchronous, time-domain operation on digitized waveforms of human speech produces artificial changes in prosodic parameters, especially fundamental frequency and rhythm. Pitch of voiced segments is raised or lowered by an algorithm which truncates or "pads," respectively, each pitch period in the stored vector by an appropriate…

Presents several minor revisions of Halle's and Keyser's theory of meter and stress. (DD)

The propensity to raise and vary the pitch of one's voice when addressing an infant or small child was investigated in a sample of 16 male and 16 female adults, half of whom were married with children and half of whom had never married and never had children. (Author/RH)

Monosyllables were recorded from a group of 24 hearing-impaired and six normal-hearing children between three and six years of age. (Author)

Challenges the belief that the intonation of yes/no questions in American English is different from that of standard British English. Reports on a study that shows that American speakers of English do not distinguish between the high-rising and low-rising intonation, and argues that the supposed difference in intonation between the two varieties…

Presents details of research on intonation in New Zealand English that demonstrate the existence of measurable and reliable speaker-sex differences in pitch measures. Two main factors are considered: the use of a perceptual scale for pitch and the nature of the tasks used to collect the speech data. (Author/VWL)