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...

In this paper, we discuss the interplay of factors that influence the intonational marking of contrast in Dutch. In particular, we examine how prominence is expressed at the prosodic level when semantically abnormal information conflicts with contrastive information. For this purpose, we conducted a production experiment in Dutch in which speakers described scenes containing fruits with unnatur...

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...

The information structure categories of Contrastive Topic and Contrastive Focus are examined to see their crucial roles in polarity and (conventional) implicature generation and implicature suspension and their respective correlatins with PA and SN conjunctions on one hand and descriptive (denotational) negation and metalinguistic negation on the other. The underlying notion of concessivity inv...

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 ...

Abdul Qadir Jurjânî, with his two famous books, is the most important scholar of Islamic rhetoric. He is the founder of rhetoric in the Muslim world. One of Jurjânî’s most prominent accomplishments is his comprehensive classification of metaphors. First of all, Jurjânî distinguishes between non-expressive and expressive metaphors, and then presents subclasses for expressive, or “useful”, metaph...

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...

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...

Several authors within psychology, neuroscience and philosophy take for granted that standard empirical research techniques are applicable when studying consciousness. In this article, it is discussed whether one of the key methods in cognitive neuroscience – the contrastive analysis – suffers from any serious confounding when applied to the field of consciousness studies; that is to say, if th...