This paper argues that generalizations about prosodic phrasing are recursive in nature. Initial evidence comes from the fragment of English consisting only of proper names and and and or. A systematic relation between the semantics, the syntactic combinatorics, and the prosodic phrasing of these coordinate structures can be captured by recursively combining the prosodies (represented as relatio...

Speaking involves sequences of linguistic units that can be produced under different sets of control strategies. For instance, a given phoneme can be achieved with different acoustic properties, and a sequence of phonemes can be performed at different speech rates and with different prosodies. How does the Central Nervous System select a specific control strategy among all the available ones? I...

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) exhibit difficulties in their comprehension of others’ emotions. According to a variety of experimental procedures, many of them can be classified into two types according to the modality of their stimuli and responses. These are intramodal (visual stimulus–visual stimulus) and cross-modal (auditory stimulus–visual stimulus) matching. Previous stud...

The human voice, which has a pivotal role in communication, is processed in specialized brain regions. Although a general consensus holds that the anterior insular cortex (AIC) plays a critical role in negative emotional experience, previous studies have not observed AIC activation in response to hearing disgust in voices. We used magnetoencephalography to measure the magnetic counterparts of m...

The present electroencephalographic (EEG) study investigated the ability of cochlear implant (CI) users to recognize emotional prosody. Two CI speech-processing strategies were compared: the ACE (Advance Combination Encoder) and the newly developed MP3000. Semantically neutral sentences spoken in three different emotional prosodies (neutral, angry, happy) were presented to 20 post-lingually dea...

People express emotions as part of everyday communication. Emotions can be judged by a combination of cues such as facial expressions, prosodies, gestures, and actions. Emotions are also articulated by written texts. Inspired by works in sentiment analysis, this thesis explores approaches to automatic detection of emotions in text. I draw from emotion theories in the fields of psychology and li...

Despite a spate of interest in the study of the Introductions of scholarly articles, thefocal genre of knowledge construction, research is yet to reach conclusive answers onthe nature of this genre. Thus, the present study analyzed research articleIntroductions, aiming to explore how the process of knowledge construction isachieved by Iranian and international writers of English research articl...

Loanword phonology seeks to model the process by which foreign words are ‘nativised’ or incorporated into the phonological system of the ‘borrowing’ language. We can conceive of this as a parsing of the phonetic input provided by the foreign word forms, in accordance with phonological output constraints of the borrowing language. Following Silverman (1992) we conceive loanword formation as fund...

This paper investigates the effect of disfluencies on listeners’ on-line processing of speech. More specifically, it tests the hypothesis that filled pauses like um, which tend to occur before words that are low in accessibility, act as a signal to the listener that a relatively inaccessible word is about to be produced. Two experiments are reported, in which participants followed recorded inst...