This study examines the acoustic correlates of stress in children’s productions of bisyllabic and trisyllabic words, differing in stress placement. Acoustic results of the data of two children aged 4;11 to 6;1 are reported as a part of a more comprehensive study on the acquisition of stress in German. In contrast to recent findings that infants show an early preference in perception for rhythmi...

This article is a preliminary overview contrasting Chinese (CN) and Swedish (SE) stops. It begins with a general description of the stop systems of these two languages. The contrastive findings suggest that teachers of Chinese as Foreign Language should pay more attention to training VOT perception instead of the usual intense listening exercises of the tones. Finally, future research on contra...

The results of a production experiment with 8 native speakers of German show that the acoustic profiles of contrastive focus differ between read monologues, read dialogues and spontaneous dialogues. The differences suggest that contrastive focus is only a matter of F0, and that two F0-related subtypes, comparative and corrective focus, may be distinguished. The additional changes in duration an...

The traditional view of phonological representation assumes that lexical representation is economical and free of redundancy and that a phoneme is represented as a combination of contrastive phonetic features. The traditional view, however, is challenged by the recent developments in phonological theories. In Optimality Theory, the distinction between contrastive vs. non-contrastive aspects of ...

due to the significance of multiculturalism in politics, and the central role linguistic devices play in organizing the political discourse, this text-based qualitative study was carried out to compare political interviews in the iranian and english contexts to find out the probable similarities and differences in the use of discourse markers (dms) between the two cultures. to this end, three s...

In languages with variable focus positions, prominent elements tend to be emphasised by prosodic cues (e.g. English). If a language prefers a given prosodic pattern, i.e. sentence-final nuclear accents, like Spanish, the prosodic realisation of broad focus might not differ from that of narrow and contrastive focus. The relevance of prosodic focus marking was tested in Hungarian were focus typic...

Composite likelihood methods provide a wide spectrum of computationally efficient techniques for statistical tasks such as parameter estimation and model selection. In this paper, we present a formal connection between the optimization of composite likelihoods and the well-known contrastive divergence algorithm. In particular, we show that composite likelihoods can be stochastically optimized b...

PURPOSE To examine the effect of instructional format on medical students' learning of ECG diagnosis. METHOD Two experiments employed different learning and practice methods. In the first, students were randomly allocated to one of two instructional approaches, one organized around features (e.g., QRS voltage) and the other around diagnostic categories (e.g., bundle branch blocks), followed b...

This paper represents a pilot investigation of primed accentuation patterns produced by advanced Dutch speakers of Italian as a second language (L2). Contrastive accent patterns within prepositional phrases were elicited in a semispontaneous dialogue entertained with a confederate native speaker of Italian. The aim of the analysis was to compare learner’s contrastive accentual configurations in...

This paper represents a pilot investigation of accentuation patterns produced by advanced Dutch speakers of Italian as a second language (L2). Contrastive accent patterns within phrases were elicited in a semi-spontaneous dialogue entertained with a confederate native speaker of Italian. The aim of the analysis was to compare learners’ contrastive accentual configurations induced by the confede...